It’s the business model, stupid! A wake-up call for incumbents like Daimler
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It’s the business model, stupid! A wake-up call for incumbents like Daimler

News is full of cool technologies like drones, blockchains or autonomous cars and their disruptive character. Traditional firms have switched to innovation mode and have now cool digital transformation units to use these new technologies. Everybody is happy. Great, isn’t it?Or wait? Can this really work that easy? I just had a project with a company that has set up an innovation unit to push…

The offer is only one building block to fulfill the value proposition
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The offer is only one building block to fulfill the value proposition

One of the beauties of the business model thinking is that we learn to see a business totally different if we really apply stringent thinking and dissect a business into its building blocks. And one of the most important concepts is that the value proposition is not the product. Why? It’s not the product that creates value but the value…

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Business Model Innovation and Story Telling: How to get the story right!

Framing the business model so it can be quickly but well understood by others is core. So, how do we do it? By Paul Hobcraft You have come to end of a fairly long week. You have finally finished your Business Model Canvas. Finally you have a working hypothesis of something that is going to challenge some of the existing…

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Business Models, Long Range Planning, Baden-Fuller and latency

Long Range Planning, a prestigious academic journal on strategy, discovered the topic of Business Models and Strategy. It dedicated a whole Special Issue to Business Models. I have mixed feelings regarding the Special Issue. On the one hand it is great that academia takes up such an important topic; on the other hand, it is shows again that academia is…

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Let’s commit a thoughtcrime

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…

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Does a customer care about your corporate strategy?

The question what  a good strategy is is difficult to answer. With hindsight it is easy: A good strategy is one that works. But in foresight? Many formulated, intended strategies are plain boring, generic and not customer centric, but focused on investors. Many business model innovators on the other hand have clear strategies that are focused on customers and on…