Study trip to California

During the upcoming week I will be visiting companies in California together with 15 students from MMT at Aalborg University.
First I will visit Sea Recovery in Los Angeles who does water purification and then jump on to San Francisco the same day, meet with the team and pay Younoodle a visit. They have a networking platform for start ups.

At Stanford University we will visit Center for Design Research and dSchool. Each department is trendsetting among universities.

SAP has a development center in California and after that we also take a jump over to Google.

Frog design Inc. is one of the most famous design companies in the world. They started their business in Germany but then moved on to California and began designing Macintosh computers.

Business model generation is everybodys responsibility

Back in November 2011, I participated in a seminar held by Innovation X which is a university funded regional initiative in the Aalborg area to serve entrepreneurs in growth industries and demonstrate various kind of assistance these entrepreneurs can obtain.

My personal objective for participating (since I am not an entrepreneur in a growth industry?) is that these seminars quite often lead to new insights which I later can implement in my daily work.

One of the lectures was given by Yariv Taran, Ph.D. from Center for Research Excellence in Business Models on the subject “Business model innovation” and showed to be highly interesting and practically applicable.

“Business model” is one of those terms (strategy and roadmap are others) that everybody uses in their own personal way. And gets away with it.

He claimed that many businesses (and their consultants) often utilize the same old handful of management tools: balanced scorecard, Porters five forces, SWOT analysis etc. and that today’s businesses are in the need for new management tools.

He defined the difference between incremental (do what we do better) and radical (do something different) innovation and took us further on to the Osterwalder model for business models.

The Business Model Canvas is highly applicable in today’s business environment as it encompasses not only the traditional parameters (product, price, place, customers etc.) but also business collaboration and partnerships which are important today.

The aim for the model was to develop a new managerial toolbox for executives and staff that describe a business model, the purpose of it and how it can be visualized (or communicated).

Since I am not an entrepreneur with my own business how can I then use the knowledge just described?

Obviously, many of us collaborate on ideas or even parts of ideas that fit into a broader context and that eventually will turn into a new business area for your business. On the other hand, all of us collaborate every day on changing the existing business models, making them more efficient, leaner, smarter, customer centric or something else.

Business models are a part of everybody’s daily work.

By means of this tool you can communicate efficient and straight forward and your managers and peers will enjoy the simplicity, the less amount of text and the overview.

Study the Business Model Canvas and study a bit more on the website where you will enjoy a 2 minute descriptive video clip.

If you got really interested in this then jump over to slideshare and read the book Business Model Generation (72 pages) for free. Dagfinn Myhre of Telenor is portrayed on page 8.

One last question: why didn’t this happen earlier?

Answer: it’s the usual lack of urgency (and why fix something which isn't broke….)

Yet.