The articles goes well along my analysis of the newspaper market, where I argue that just a transfer of the paper business model to the Internet does not work since the business model of traditional papers is unbundled by the Internet. A newspaper is three businesses (content, advertising (selling of readers’ attention) and classifieds (bringing demand and supply together) bundled together by paper. And on the Internet, the glue of paper does not exists any more. So the revenue model of newspapers will not work on the Internet.
Varian argues that newspapers actually never earned money with news from their frontpages but from special interest sections like Automotives, Travel, Home & Garden or Food & Drinks. These sections attracted contextually targeted advertising which is much more effective than non-targeted advertising like you have in the news section.
And in the Online world, special-interest sites attract the search-engine traffic and not general-interest sites like the Internet pages of newspapers.
Well, when you follow his arguments than a mere transfer of the traditional business model to the web will never work for newspapers.
Simply put. The Internet is different. It has different economics and therefore you have to adapt your business model to the changing economics. Either you do it or you die! And this not only true for newspapers but also for other industries.
In the discussion on business model innovation the focus is often on the innovations regarding the value proposition or on the value architecture but it is interesting to look at the revenue model as well for starting points for an innovation.
Anders Sundelin in a recent blog post reflected on net working capital and the influence of the business model on it. I can only recommend his post to anyone. He shows how this important financial figure (net working capital) is influenced by the business model. Actually, almost all innovation in the retail industry change the economics of the industry. They all start by minimizing the working capital needed in the operation. Since the traditional business model in retailing is very capital intensive due to inventory, all disruptive innovations help to reduce the capital tied to inventory. And interestingly, at the same time as the working capital is decreased or in same cases, it even becomes negative the margins on sales go down.
One example: department stores vs. discounters
In the 1960s managers in department stores were having a good time. Department stores ( marked with a 1) went well and their economics were great with gross profits of 40% on sales. Imaging you would have worked at let’s say Karstadt, a German department store. You have a great idea. You believe that the future of retailing will be different and you have the idea a discounter retail outlet with limited stocks and less choice for the clients. You do your economics and you end up with a gross profit of 23% on sales (marked with a 2).
The Swiss private banks are under pressure to change their business model. It is not just pressure from other states that want to fight tax evasion via exchange of information on bank customers but also from employers that try to sell stolen customers’ data to foreign governments.
The big news in Switzerland is that an informant, crook or thief – whatever you like to call him depends from your standpoint – has offered the German authorities data from 1,500 German customers of Swiss Banks that have allegedly dodged taxes. Last year, another informant stole data on 3,000 French bank clients from the HSBC branch in Switzerland and sold it to the French authorities. And in 2008, Germany already purchased data on German customers of the Liechtenstein Bank LGT. The LGT case cost the German government several million Euro but they received a far higher pay-back on its investment form all the taxes and fines that the busted tax evaders had to pay.
There will be more
And these three data thefts will not be the last. It is not only the authorities of high-tax countries like France or Germany that see their high return of investment if they buy data from informants but also there will be more willing bankers that will sell data of its customers. Why? Read the rest of this entry »
To be honest, I get a bit bored about the mantra that design thinking will solve the problems of large corporation. Well, when I go through the case studies at Ideo I am extremely impressed by their client list but not about the output. I have seen several design thinking sessions and I am not impressed at all with the output. The results are very often: More-of-the-Same but with fancier design.
Wer hat es erfunden? Novo Nordisk insulin pen
Where is the invention from design thinking that changed the industry? Where is the iTunes or the Kindle of Ideo? The problem with design thinking starts very early in the process with the problem definition phase. And that is where large corporations fail. They define the scope too narrow and than you get nice new things that sustain your current business but not new business models that rock your industry and yourself.
Ideo is a very good (self-) marketing & design firm but not an industry rocking firm. Large firms just love Ideo because Ideo just offers such a well designed process to solve the big problem of “being not innovative”. You hire Ideo for comforting yourself for not using your own common sense and your own customer insights. You just outsource your understanding of the customer to Ideo.
In the discussion on business model innovation an important point is missing: the culture in which the business is conducted. A business is all about people “creating” customers.
Businesses are not a technical machine with input and output factors. Businesses are places where human beings work together for a common goal and therefore the culture in a business is a defining part of a business and therefore also for the business model.
Most definitions of what a business model is are rather technical. We talk about components, patterns, building blocks. We make a lot of fuss about how we rearrange the components as if they were just Lego bricks. We believe that having in mind a great new business model is already a business model innovation.
Where are the people?
Ups, no! That does not work. Somehow the most important “building block” of a business is missing: The human being that designs, shapes and makes the business work and the customer who has to buy into the new value proposition and pay. And here again we have the human factor. “[I]nnovation is not what innovators do but what customers adopt.”We always have to remember what Michael Schrage is saying. It is the customer acceptance that makes an innovation. Read the rest of this entry »
Dell announced on September 21, 2009 that it will acquire Perot System for $3.9 billion. Dell was the poster child of business model innovation. It had “invented” the direct sales model for PCs. Instead of going via resellers Dell sold its computers directly via telephone or the Internet to its customers. Now, Dell is extending its traditional business into services. Will this work?
I feel very ambivalent about the announced deal. First, Dell pays a premium of a 61% for Perot Systems. That is a huge premium and from my time as an investment banker at Lazard I know it is very difficult to recoup and justify such a premium. But even more problematic is that with the purchase Dell does not solve its problem with its current business model.
The deal makes sense from a corporate strategy perspective. Dell is suffering in its core business a steep fall in prices. For many years Dell was the price leader but now HP tries to undercuts Dell. The first time in the history of PCs, the new Microsoft operating system Windows 7 will need fewer resources than the previous version, Windows Vista. That is bad news for computer makers that usually expect a big boost in sales from a new operating system.
Dell’s former business model innovation
In the past Dell’s value proposition was to sell individually configured PCs and servers at a low price.Read the rest of this entry »
The newspaper industry is suffering these days. Besides the economic crisis that leads to less advertising spending the traditional business model is under attack by the Internet. The large papers have reacted with large Internet activities that attract a lot of traffic. But the revenues of the online ventures are not sufficient to compensate for the decline in print. So what shall they do?
I had the pleasure recently to be invited back to my university, the University of St. Gallen, to give a speech on business model innovation in the media industry. Prof. Martin Eppler was so kind to sponsor the discussion. I used 8 theses to present my thoughts. Below you find the slides of my presentation.
Tradition is not a business model
The media industry is an interesting case since their traditional business model is under attack by new technologies. I use the music and the newspaper industry as cases to make my points. Although both are affected by the Internet, they face Read the rest of this entry »
The majority of managers still believe that their traditional business models will hold in the future. But the way we communicate is changing. You can call it Web2.0, you can call it what ever. The fact is, that things are changing. And the fact is that most business models stem from a time where we just had human beings and paper as the main medium.
And it is not just that people use the Internet to communicate. More and more devices start to communicate with each other with no website in between that a human being can see. Previously dumb devices get some intelligence and can communicate with each other.
The video is a great summary of all the chances happening. Although the video is only about convergence in the media industry, think about what the changes will mean to your business model, to the way you advertise, the way how you address your customers, to the way how your customers can exchange information between each other.
Good news for all the evangelist of business model innovation. McKinsey has developed an innovation performance score (IPS) that shows that “a significant degree of business model innovation seems to be necessary for superior innovation impact.”
The idea of business model innovation was not developed at the large consultancy companies like McKinsey, BCG or booz. Probably they were too busy optimizing the current business of their current clients. And usually their clients are the incumbent in their respective business. Probably, the large consultancies are trapped what Clayton Christiensen calls resource dependency. Christiensen and others argue that you are dependent in your strategic decision from your main sources where you get your resources from and most of the time it is from your existing clients. In the case of the large consultancies the customers are the incumbents that lose the most from business model innovation.
Business model innovation as new strategy type
The idea stems from researchers like Alex Osterwalder, Gary Hamel (business concept innovation), W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne with their blue ocean strategy or me. In stead of looking at the incumbents we were looking at entrepreneurs/ outsiders that created industries or changed their industries forever. While Alex and I came from New Economy side where we saw that new media allows new business models, Hamel, Kim and Mauborgne came from the traditional strategy schools at universities.
Measuring the impact of innovation is old subject but most measurement systems had severe shortcomings. Read the rest of this entry »
In formulated strategy we use a lot of words like innovative, based on core competencies, market driven, customer centric, operational excellence, best-in-class, top quality, leveraging existing brand, etc…. You named it and of course business model and business model innovation are now part of these buzz words. Are they still meaningful or did we forget the deeper concepts behind the words? Do we use the technocratic jargon to signal others that we are the experts?
doublethink by duncan
As I have argued in my last post, I think we use in strategy and in management in general too many generic and meaningless words. And I think we use also too many meaningless graphs and pictures to say nothing as a matter of fact. Visualization does not help you if your strategy is bad. Sorry, Alex for this .
Every decent firm claims in restructuring that it is concentrating on its core competencies when divesting or closing parts of its firm. Well, and often it is the same firm that argued some time ago that it was necessary to buy this now divested firm since it wanted to offer full service to its customers. We have so many words for “Sorry, it did not work. We just could not make it work”. Why are we so afraid about the truth?
Management Newspeak
In management we have invented Newspeak. Original, Newspeak is a fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language. While in Orwell’s novel the government tries to introduce Newspeak to the people in order to make the people more compliant to its will, in the case of management it is our own fault. We managers use our own Newspeak and we have taken all meaning out of it. Read the rest of this entry »
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