business model

Every time you choose a model like e.g. a business model canvas or a customer journey you are choosing which information is important to you and which information is not.

e.g. if you map a customer journey for a trip from home to work using public transport you are saying that how many buss drivers there are is not a part of your problem to solve, or that you don’t need to calculate in the scarcity of busses, cost of fuel or the city’s traffic or noise pollution regulations.

The story of how the venerable Ford Motor Company managed to recover from the Great Recession of 2008 may be one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in U.S. history.  And it demonstrates how great brands rebound from turbulent times.  Not only did Ford recover, but it ended up thriving and achieving heights once thought impossible for an American carmaker.

A Different Way of Thinking About Brand

Everyone is searching for a game changer. In a dorm, a basement, a bedroom, a lab, a hip co-working office space or a tiny start-up, someone, somewhere is just beginning to really give shape to an idea they’ve had for a while. 

Leo Burnett’s fledgling firm got off to an inauspicious start when it opened in 1935. With one client account, a staff of eight and a bowl of apples in reception, cynics said that he would soon be selling those apples on the street.

Amidst the slavish devotion to customer experience and the ideology of customer-centricity I find Ryanair refreshing and instructive – including its recent change in stance towards how the organisation treats its customers. What can we learn from Ryanair and this change in stance?

If the title to this blog sounds a bit like I am trying to make a connection to Business Model Generation (BMGEN) by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, you’re absolutely correct. As a former academic, I am a big believer in making connections and extensions to the models of others. In the end, I believe that this supports my primary goal in writing articles and blogs – to share knowledge that others can use.

“An amazing ‘invention’ that didn’t turn out to be an innovation” – that’s how one expert described Tata Motors’s Nano.  Indeed, the current predicament of the $2,000 compact car that was introduced in India with great fanfare in 2008 holds some valuable takeaways for aspiring disrupters.

According to the 2010/11 Taking Part survey published by the Dept of Culture, Media & Sport the proportion of adults in the UK who visited a public library in the past year fell from 48.2% in 2005/6 to just 39.4% in 2009/10. At that rate of decline in less than two decades nobody will be visiting libraries.

Ever since the introduction of the iTunes music store, I was under the impression that $0.99 would become the default price for all digital content. One way or another, content would be continually sliced and diced into ever-smaller pieces of micro-content, such that the market-clearing price for that content would become $0.99. Then I ran into Kickstarter, the innovative crowdfunding site for artistic and creative projects.