I recently wrote a post “Delving into a complex world- helping to keep pace”.……to help us to keep pace, learn apply and adapt.

Finding time to read and extend our thinking is a real struggle and going that extra mile to read thought-leadership views can be a step to far, I know but I can’t help myself, it is part of my job and certainly for me, many are really worth it.

In that post I was recommending Deloitte and their thought leadership as a good place to visit.

Now I’m not sure how many of you actually did, so I thought in this post  to pick out specifically two great articles and make a post summary of these, as I feel both of these might be useful, as they challenge and break new ground in thinking.

So I can’t compete with getAbstract or Soundview or many others, offering the service of learning a book’s key ideas in less than 10 minutes but hopefully the two I’ve chosen will beat the time it takes in this one read to cover what I feel cover two topical and important innovation thoughts of the present for many involved in innovation.

The two thought leadership pieces I have chosen.Each of these are in the field of innovation so hopefully they will be of interest and raise your curiosity to dig a little deeper, if not then you have the key insights (from my perspective) here and that should be maybe enough to become more aware.

The two I have decided to summarize are 1) Beyond Design Thinking and 2) Minimum Viable Transformation.

Beyond Design Thinking

Written by Larry Keeley, president and co-founder of Doblin, Inc., an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems and the famous “Ten Types of Innovation”. A ‘given’ place to begin framing your innovation.

Beyond Design Thinking – reflecting on its place

Here Larry is discussing another really important system, about Beyond Design Thinking and let me pick out the key thinking within this article:

It opens with “Corporations have grown enamored with design thinking” and although design is in the ascendance, as it is powerful, effective and transformational if practiced or approached right, its trend needs examining. The key to design thinking is it begins by imagining a solution that does not exist yet, and then set about outlining a pathway to realizing it. Normally we make an assessment of a problem and seek correcting it.

What is at the heart of design thinking?

Design thinking has at its heart the generation of (lots of) ideas, build prototypes, try many things, build narratives about them, test everything, do more of what works and all the time show a clear bias for action, looking to shoot for the moon, or even Mars. All exciting, motivating stuff.

The creep is we are beginning to make design thinking a panacea – we start believing it can fix the ‘dry stuff’, the overly rational planning approaches to optimize around predetermined and deeply analyzed market segments, we are actually abusing design thinking. Larry argues that certainly conventional approaches to planning are overdue for reinvention; design thinking is sometimes treated as superficial to truly deliver on grand expectations. It falls down attempting the wrong things or trying to fit design thinking into the events of the day.

Certainly I’ve seen or witnessed many brainstorming or management meetings that have asked along a design thinking expert, who pulled out of the hat, like the magical rabbit, a wondrous show to excite, determine and mostly fill an otherwise boring day. We all got terribly excited until the magic wore off and it didn’t make a scrap of difference. This is not what design thinking should be for.

It is crafting analysis with synthesis, it is expecting divergence and convergence

As business rushes to embrace design thinking, it does move tradecraft beyond simply plain, vanilla analysis, it does embrace synthesis that helps build bolder and more newsworthy things. It can help firms build breakthroughs and contribute to the ‘genesis’ of profound insights and that alone can become the basis for an innovation team to put in the hard work of building (and validating) a breakthrough conceived through design thinking.

It is suggested in the article “put simply, analysis without synthesis is predictable and commonplace, design thinking without deep analysis is reckless.” It is seeking how to do both in integrated, even dazzling new ways.

To quote again: “when we have such highly contested markets….. it becomes a real skill to imagine a better world, make it tangible, build narratives about it and then work through the dozens of obstacles that anything new faces throughout its development”

Even more so “in a world where connectivity, collaboration, interdependence and user engagement all converge to build modern integrated ecosystems, where we formerly thought of industries”.

The quest for elegant integration of our innovation solutions

So Larry Keeley is suggesting within this article beyond design thinking we need to find “elegant integration” as effective innovations today are more about this elegant innovation of the known than the primary invention of the new. This is what is driving industry transformation everywhere.

The road ahead for the design field is three fold: use information deftly to manage complexity, great design is a critical catalyst and acceleration to the overall advance you seek and you should avoid labeling this design thinking as it is informed analysis, seamlessly synthesized into a coherent, beautiful solution.

As we transform from examples like Candy Crush, Alibaba, and countless others have as their shared property: they fuse together insights that come from sophisticated analytics, with experiences that are brilliantly designed to be easy, smart, convenient and entirely understandable.

That is where the power of design thinking turns products into platforms, offering deep solutions and your industry evolves into an ecosystem. It is down to getting all the parts right, needing analysis and syntheses to work together.

My second summary: Minimum Viable Transformation

This is written by one of my favorite thought-leaders, John Hagel III, who has written here with Jacob Bruun-Jensen about minimum viable transformation and he has a follow up article of the same name over on LinkedIn focusing more on the edge to create new business value. Let me summarize the two, hopefully enough for it to make sense.

To succeed in today’s networked economy, businesses must participate in dynamic, evolving networks of diverse organizations. And while such networks can be difficult to navigate, they offer companies the opportunity to evolve their business models, deepen skills and knowledge, expand into new markets, and scale operations.

To stay viable amid accelerating change, businesses themselves must change more frequently—and in ways that use their business ecosystems as fertile ground for collaboration and transformation.

As an aside, I am spending increasing amounts of time on understanding ecosystems for innovation and its management, but that’s for another day.

Scaling edges that might become our new core

One method used to scale edges is minimum viable transformation. Scaling an edge is a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

Here, when we are at an edge, a company pulls together the essential elements of a new business model into a barely working construct, one specifically designed to test key risks.

Acknowledging and embracing minimum viable product principles

Minimum viable products, for example, are like prototypes—except that instead of being tinkered with internally, they’re immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire.

So why would a company do such a thing? The minimum viable product is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible. It’s designed not as proof of concept, but to test hypotheses and unearth unknowns that could sink a new offering.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model—anything from minute changes to operational processes to full restructuring of the go-to-market strategy. At its core, it’s a strategy for gathering validated learning about individual business model elements, then assessing how those elements interact and combine to form one cohesive strategy.

The need today is to innovate at the level of the Business Model

Rethinking the fundamentals of how a business creates and captures value has become a priority, we are in a different era, the past one was of slow change and stable industries yet we still saw rapid convergence. The sheer acceleration and changes in technology, customer desires and the need to build ecosystems is making the Business Model far more important to focus on than product and service innovations.

The problem is we are still not clear how shifting business models is supposed to get done. Taking the trend “minimum viable product” populated by Eric Reis and his Lean Start-up methodology – it suggests by pulling together the essential elements of, in this case, new business models, into barely working prototype models, specifically designed to test key risks, you learn from ‘lightweight’ and readily adaptable versions of potentially new business models to take them forward or rethink your original hypothesis.

Both MVP and MVT are like prototypes but they are simply not passed around and tinkered with internally, they are immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire. In Eric Reis’s view it is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible.

This minimal approach must be specifically designed, not as a proof of concept but I repeat, to test hypotheses and gain knowledge about the biggest unknowns that could sink any new offering.

Each change from minute operational change to global restructuring is better understood by iterative discovery but with full disclosure to customers, who surprisingly are very willing to join the journey of learning. This becomes a validated learning journey.

The whole approach to this minimum viable transformation is looking for understanding to reduce the risks of large-scale change. The core principles of MVP – validate learning, rapid prototyping, frugal creativity along with thinking MVT for reducing risks, increasing understanding of scale and speed makes for a potentially appealing approach to working on new Business Models.

Why explore new Business Models at the edge?

Focusing on “scaling edges,” allows for identifying promising “edges” for the organization, then grow that edge until it becomes a viable new core or complementary line of business. Such an approach can make it possible for businesses to reinvent themselves while minimizing potential risks—and maximizing impact.

An edge is a growth opportunity that has the potential to scale—so much so that it can catalyze change, eventually becoming effective enough to replace the core of the business. A true edge should align with larger trends disrupting the industry. Edges involve fundamentally different business models and practices from those of the core.

Edges give the transformation team far more degrees of freedom to test and experiment with new approaches to evolving a fundamentally different business model.

We finish this with five guidelines for transformation on the edge

Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:

1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.

2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.

3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.

4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.

5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.

In Summary

Both of these articles come from a significant report, the full report is “Business ecosystems come of age“. The notion of business ecosystems is now a crucial focal point for innovation, analysis, and strategic planning. Businesses are moving beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises.

The world is entering an era in which ideas and insights come from everywhere, and crowds, clouds, collaborators, competitions, and co-creators can fundamentally help define our shared future. The business environment is being permanently altered as a result.

We require the thinking of thought leaders to emphasize and point us to ideas that we can adopt, experiment with and learn to our own benefit. For this learning, you need the time to read, explore and experiment.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have this added to my own site

The post Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is a sense of urgency that is growing at the corporate level, to master this ability to design different business models and then set about executing them, to combat the multiple ‘disruptive forces’ swirling around in the present and near-term business environment.

Reinventing the Business model is such a big ask in the complexities to overcome, the legacies, the vested interests, the distribution of created wealth (dividends, bonuses, performance) are all ‘locked into’ the existing business. Many of those necessary bolder decisions get caught up in horrible compromise.  Parallel managing is both an art and a science but it always needs clarity.

Addressing the current dilemma within business models

So we have a classic dilemma, we need to manage and extract as much as we can from the existing business but simultaneously begin to reinvent, to design something different.

Caught up in this dilemma, increasingly the large organization is questioning how it can use the Business model canvas in more effective ways. I believe there are many exciting options available.

Business models need a common language, they need to be easily described and here is the fundamental value of the BMC – it can set about supporting a common understanding, it can be used to describe in multiple ways.

Here is my view  

Move the thinking. Move the emphasis. Today the BMC is discussed more as the blank canvas to start new ideas and concepts and its present focus has been in its use for start-ups and entrepreneurs. From these opening sketches, the canvas does a great initial job to describe these ‘emerging’ concepts. We need to change this emphasis point.

The possible new dimensional values of the Business model canvas.

Make the Business model canvas as a multiple describing and communicating tool. We should shift our thinking and open our minds up to its (BMC) greater value within the larger organizations

These are clearly:

• To simply explore new business models as the book, the Business model generation, originally sets out, in the how what and where of doing this through the business model canvas approach. To experiment with all the advice, tools and experiences that have been built up since this book first appeared.

The richer and perhaps broader dimensions that large organizations should explore:

• To ‘map’ changes to existing business models as they evolve or need to pivot differently. Steve Blank has explained this insignificant detail and terms as the BM dashboard that ‘indicates’ the important changes and these become the focal point of necessary discussion, knowing what is changing, to focus the thinking and see what changes need supporting differently.
• Then why not to sketch out competitors positions to explore possible opportunity gaps. This should become one of those consistent ‘habits’ that so many large organizations often have a real blind spot to undertake, they just keep assuming nothing has ‘visibly’ changed. Then they get caught out and surprised when they see their share slipping away as the competitor has made a directional change and this was not spotted and communicated to all parties who ‘need’ to know. The BM Canvas can spot and track competitors.
• Use it as a designing dashboard for innovations that have or could have an impact on existing business models. Whenever you have any major BM change you capture it on your BM Canvas so all above and below in the organization can picture this to see the possible risks this change might bring.
• Use it to compare business model components across each of the countries within the organization, where more often than not different models are being applied to build businesses in multiple ways. This enables all involved to quickly focus on the differences on these operating models and how the market formation is occurring to get quickly into the strategic discussions, implications, and requirements this ‘specific’ approach takes.
• When you are pitching for internal funds having a clear BMC as the visual focal point provides the top picture that others can quickly see and appreciate the why and how – they ‘see’ the value and the $$ potential,. This can offer ‘intelligent inquiry’ not getting bogged down in detail and getting involved in the running of the business but supporting owners or business managers with different experiences and knowledge to compliment theirs, so as to conduct the type of ‘intelligent’ and strategic conversation needed, instead of many that needlessly occur today.
• To have ready alternative scenario’s for volatile business conditions as ‘early warning scenarios’ that have mapped out potential changing conditions showing where, why and how the business model might be adjusted or radically changed. The earlier ‘warning system’ pays in volatile times that we are all facing at present to be more aware and ready for rapidly changing conditions, possibly already ‘worked up’.
• Managing multiple portfolios of business is a complex challenge to spot ‘commonality,’ to detect change, different opportunities or simply recognizing there is a growing ‘drift’ of direction that needs addressing. You can use the BMC as the detection kit, the reoccurring adopted format practice to capture these different portfolios.
• Rapid concept brainstorming to move into prototyping evaluation and market testing. Testing many different variations in small bite-sized bets is rapid prototyping, do this through the effective use of the business model canvas. Testing fast in the actual marketplace new business models and then learning from them to improve the approach is absolutely critical. Get the customer involved and engaged, get your potential partners grouped around the BMC to build and extend out, the internal thinking.
• The business model needs to be constantly tested for its potential in its recurring value, and it needs a canvas to constantly challenge its present position and worth.

There are multiple ways the business model canvas can be explored in exciting new visual ways so as to describe effectively in a common format and capture the wealth of different opportunities.  To invent, to communicate and explore the ‘richness’ within the potential value that is simply laying underneath the different components that make up a business model.

Let’s keep moving the conversation forward on where the business model can work in creative ways within large organizations. Do you have any further ideas?

The post The Age of Large Business Model Reinvention first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Well in the Business model canvas we have the cost side, the back-end, made up of the activities, resources and partnership aspects and a revenue side, the front end, made up of customer segments, channels and customer relationships. It is the ‘net worth’ of all these blocks that makes up their contribution to the Value Proposition.

It is the nine building blocks when we put them together, tells the complete story, a little like a business model balance sheet. Balancing this out thoughtfully does need that bringing it all together, so as to give others the compelling story and begin to mobilise around and attract the necessary resources.

My question though is this: “is the BMC understated at the back-end today and should we strike a different balance for more established organizations?”

What happens when one side perhaps gets over emphasised?

Very much the orientation of the business model canvas is presently skewed towards the front end – the market facing part and rightly so. You are in search of a new business model, you will never find it in the building. As Steve Blank rightly stated “you have to get out of the building” to validate your assumptions or hypothesis, to search for the value in the real marketplace.

The present BMC creative energy focuses are mostly placed on the front end as  many of the emerging tools, methodologies and creative work seek to explain and explore this in novel ways, helping to work out if you do a have a meaningful business emerging or not. You want to test your ideas or concept as soon as possible. As you learn, you pivot, learning what makes sense to customers, what might not, making continuous adjustments to confirm the business idea.

Now we need the same creative energy application channelled to the back-end to draw out the supporting aspects that underpin the new business model.

Today, the BMC is well accepted for start-up’s, for entrepreneurs but still does struggle to gain the real momentum it deserves and can contribute within larger organizations. Why is this?

The back-end and its lack of real attention just might be holding the BMC back for large organizations. Now we need the back-end to have the same ‘explosive’ forces and focus, as the front end. Let me explain why:

So for me the understated side of the BMC is the back-end.

Here we are looking to ‘plug in’ the key partners, the key activities and the key resources. If you look at any introduction to the BMC you get these as short explanatory introductions to these three parts

Key Partners – what can partners do better than you at lower cost (and thus leverage your business model)

Key Activities – What activities do you need to perform in your business model and how easily?

Key Resources – What resources does your business model require? These are seen as the assets required offering and delivering the other described elements within the BMC.

Perhaps these are just not deep enough in explanations, even for a starting point for a new business model design. These prompters as they initially stand, inadequately address the existing organisations deeper issues in my view.

The ‘drag’ in adoption performance might lie at the back end

The Business model canvas and by extension BM design, struggles with the back-end, this tends to always ‘lag’ as we address ‘breaking opportunity’, especially in established organizations. There is too much invested legacy. This is the ‘drag,’ the anchor weight, that holds bigger businesses back in investing fully in (radical) business model design. We need to open this up, in finding solutions that resolve this back end of the BM canvas.

Originally when Alexander Osterwalder was working through his thesis that ‘spawned’ the BMC, he was talking far more of a multi-layer set of approaches where you had a more defined planning level – the strategic layer, following by the architectural level – the business model layer and then the third level, the implementation level for the process layer. He suggested (at the time) layers ( or you can say stacks) were acting like glue between strategy, business and processes. I think he was right. We need to layer and glue.

We need to ‘layer and glue’ at the back-end

The BMC frame does not need to be changed as resources, partners and activities can be a sufficient ‘catch all’. What we need to actually do is raise often the ‘thorny’ issues, of existing structures, conflicts and possible solutions to overcome these.

This time we don’t get out of the building to learn, we ‘work’ the existing building (or organization) to begin to identify and test aspects of your emerging business model across all the internal ‘touch points’.

We are equally looking to discover and validate in our initial explorations , to pivot and stay agile and aware. To ‘flush out’ roadblocks, internal barriers and search for novel solutions. To keep gaining acceptance and recognition.

Here we are exploring existing infrastructure and looking at what would be needed that would be different to support a new business model. To build anew or extend.

I think it is time to let the infrastructure skeleton out of the cupboard.

We have to acknowledge and talk through the fact that big organizations have involved processes, they operate in complex ecosystems that are difficult to navigate, negotiate change with and seeing where you need to pick certain parts of the value system apart to accommodate the new. Perhaps it is easier to ‘start anew’ or spin out the new business as the antibodies can come rushing in to kill anything life threatening.

The other issue is the reputation risk.

Can you accommodate a small, lean and light weight business in its early stages as it tries to sit alongside the big brothers of existing businesses? Many of the larger organizations have thresholds for revenue size that are telephone numbers to even think of creating something even more ‘demanding,’ a new business model.

You struggle everywhere within established organizations to make the necessary changes to adopt new business models, there is so much vested interest. Yet new business models are desperately needed. So lets address  back-end constraints head on?

We need to tackle complexity far more and early on.

Often the complexity within our organizations; the politics, the whole need to convince established positions & overcome legacies will hold most simply back from exploring business models, on a broad, bolder front. They don’t want to acknowledge the necessary holistic fit of all nine building blocks. They attempt to retrofit what they see into the existing back ends, into their known and existing paradigms.

This limits the potential not just of the visionary power of the BMC but the whole design of any new business model. Often new BM’s are squeezed into the existing:  the push through existing channels, sold to existing customer segments, delivered within the existing supply chain, managed through the same resources and invoiced through the existing systems. We compromise, perhaps, the greater potential by not reflecting deep enough on what new BM’s can give us.

There is nothing wrong with leveraging what you have, exploiting existing resources and structures but as you are drawing on what you know (exists) you can stay blindsided to what it can potentially offer. If you don’t ‘opened up’ your mind and thinking that little bit more you can constrain a new concepts real, sometimes game changing, potential.

We need to ‘ratchet up’ existing visual methods and tools.

This is the exciting place to be, designing new tools and visualisation but let’s focus fully across the whole Business Model Canvas.  We do need to talk more ‘content,’ more purposeful design at the back-end, if the bigger organisation is going to sign up in the way it can, but equally, make it creatively applied.

We need to think how architecture and agility can combine; an opening exploration of operations, systems, applications, and of thinking different ways to be agile thus providing a more transition planning approach to underpin the emerging business model’s design.

Alex talks sometimes about a CAD equivalent for business model design in the future. Perhaps he has something there. We need to design the structure, work through modification, analysis and search for optimisation no different from the front end. This is why we need the Business Model Design Architect as central to this required repositioning, to manage the complete design of any business model’s new blueprint.

My call here is that we need to broaden the  back-end conversation.

Let’s get the conversation going on the back-end and then unleash the multiple designers within this part, not just the huge community of IT related architects already out there working on many of these internal problems. We need creative design, ingenuity and understanding, all combining in new ways.

We need to step up one big huge level within conversations around Business Model design in existing organisations. We need to seek creative, visually stimulating solutions to the complexity that lies within the four walls of organisations. Let’s address the internal complexity and all learn by openly exploring this. We need to get the toolsmiths working on forging the internal BMC foundry, block by block.

To play back to the team designing and orchestrating the BMC, we do need to create better conversation at the back-end of the BMC. We need a new depth in the visual tools needed to capture this side of the canvas.

Otherwise, we don’t stay at beginners level Alex, we stay locked into start-ups and entrepreneurial check lists as the use for the business model canvas and that would be such a pity. Addressing the architecture of the back-end is essential.

We need to address the existing organisation far, far better in the back-end

Until we address this back-end far more, then I think the BMC will stay considerably  constrained, especially for established organisations. It might simply remain a check list, or as Steve Blank chose to depict it as the Business Model dashboard, or it is only a starting block A4 white board to begin to explore new ideas for start-ups and entrepreneurs.

It might not become the real ‘catalyst’ for exploring new business models as I believe it can be in established organizations. That would be a real shame, if the back-end stays a clear liability on the business model balance sheet. The back-end is hugely different within the established organization and the business model canvas needs to tackle this urgently, in a host of highly creative ways that we have seen extensively applied to other parts of the BMC. Lets get a better balance in our thinking.

The post The Understated Back-End of the Business Model Canvas. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Those without a legacy or are really agile usually are in pole position to explore new opportunities quickly. Also to start with a blank business canvas is exhilarating. It seems we are in the era of the Entrepreneur or are we?

The entrepreneur has a great chance to pioneer, to quickly expand and seize those opportunities to disrupt those occupants serving a known market. The art of discovering the unmet needs of not just existing consumers but attracting in the ones presently outside the focus markets is such a valuable place to attack.

The constraints within the existing organizations

Designing the new business model seems an awful lot easier than if you were involved within the’ poor old’ established organization locked into its structures, systems, existing markets positions battling with satisfying existing shareholders. Just moving those conflict points along within the organization often seems certainly from the outside, in perpetual conflict. There is a real challenge to see things differently and design differently!

The established organization has to combat this increasing threat from all these “usurpers”. There is a strong call for change in existing organizations but there are often complex ecosystems to overcome and the demands for new structures and approaches to resolving these are increasing.

The ever increasing call for more C-EX’s of something

It seems we are continually called upon to add more chief officers in innovation, in information, in knowledge, etc., etc. to address the constant gaps found within existing organizations inability to adapt, focus and design the business. Specialisation is needed but we seem to increasingly lack the function of pulling this all together.

The Chief Executive seems to be so out on a limb defending, cajoling, managing and simply reacting to constant crises across their shortening tenure; we are losing the bigger picture perspective when it comes to designing the business to shape it towards the future.

We need to manage the cross-cutting concerns in functionality, in constraints, in unlocking the resources successfully. Yes you could argue this is the role of the Chief Operating Officer but they seem far more focused on squeezing every bit of juice they can find from the existing operations. I hated it when the COO came knocking, you knew it was going to hurt. So who is this person then?

This person, I call the Business Architect who designs and develops the business ecosystem.

This person or function has to hold distinct views of the five essential aspects that impact across the organization. They are seeking out the unique ways for the internal competencies, processes and assets to combine and relate in seizing ‘breaking’ new business model design. They must have a comprehensive overview:

1.       They have the business strategy view and then are capable to break these down into the essential parts to tackle and address the strategic needs. They provide the strands for traceability to make sure these components are being actively worked upon

2.       Check and test the business capabilities and flag where gaps are found, assign the resource and focus to bridge these gaps and set about the building of the lasting capabilities needed to meet the business design needs

3.       Seek out and make sure the flow of business knowledge is occurring by applying a clear absorptive capabilities structure that sets about capturing, facilitating, accelerating and diffusing knowledge for it to flow throughout the organization and to its partners.

4.       Possess the best business operational view or be part of the inner team to support operational structures that cut across functional and organizational boundaries. This includes working the boundaries to extend and push any key design parameters, such as open innovation, platform innovation, collaborative ventures that extend and build on the existing entity.

5.       Have a clear view on the operation– perhaps not the responsible oversight but is able to capture, explain and link roles, capabilities and map these to the challenges being tackled today but designing those that need to be taken forward to build the future in more adaptive designs.

These five aspects have been discussed in numerous Business Architecture papers before and are suggested to provide the integrated view of the organization.

The absolute difference, for me, is not having these buried within the IT department but given the critical centre piece role of being the Chief Business Model Design Architect across the organization with an essential seat within the C-level team. They are responsible for the value configuration, building the necessary capabilities and focusing on the key activities and resources that are needed to implement change for different business models. They are a real change maker.

So we need strong business model design architecture today.

This person and his team design the business logic. It sets about to understand and describe the building blocks of business model design. It is the master of the Business model canvas, it understand the importance of the parts, their interlocking nature and can describe the rationale of how the organization creates, captures and delivers value for today’s business and is constantly exploring the future alternatives and having these designed into the future considerations.

The Business Model Architect designs the different blueprints. They work out offering through all the means necessary the common understanding, facilitate the roadblocks and design constraints so as to align the strategic objectives with the demands placed on the design of the organization. They work the team, they cut across boundaries, they set about ‘creating’ the organizational framework and deliver the “how we do it”, they are the business design translators.

They seek to design constantly what is needed, they look to instigate and demand changing capabilities to increase flexibility, to optimize and to adapt what is in place with what is needed to deliver the opportunities identified for giving new growth.  They map, model and design. They make design more dynamic to adapt to change.

Maybe they are tasked with offsetting  the entrepreneur out there, presently determined to disrupt their business. It is time for exploring all the value points of being the ‘incumbent’ and it needs this holistic business architecture approach.

They have and own the Architecture mandate for the organization for designing the architecture framework necessary for the business model and its design, not just for today but for the future.

The challenge is to provide them with all the tools and immense ingenuity available to them if they can harness it correctly, which I believe they can. ‘Locked’ within the organization is plenty of latent energy wanting to find new ways of working, new designs, structures and processes.

The design of new business models needs a clear focal point within established organizations. The very catalyst is that you need the Architect to orchestrate and completely manage this design process.

The post The (Re)birth of the Architect for the Business Model Design first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There seems a lot at present going on around the Business Model and formulating its design. Following on from the Business Design Summit held in Berlin in April of this year there seems to be a gathering of momentum surrounding the Business model.

There is an awful lot of designing going on, actually it is hard to juggle with it all, even for me that has a 100% focus on innovation.

The Business Design Summit had as its primary question: “Are the Business Tools you are using relevant for today’s world?”

It went on to ask “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them, instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking”. “Your business ideas deserve better than PowerPoint and Excel”

The momentum is specifically aimed at Business innovation design tools and how to manipulate them and this is giving rise to the ‘school’ of tool-smiths. I wrote about the Business model canvas as set to explode in 2012 and events this year are certainly ‘exploding’ in multiple ways. Let me give some examples:

The Business Model has become even more critical to create and relate too. Rita Gunther McGrath has just released her book “The End of Competitive Advantage- how to keep your strategy as fast as your business”, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Her whole premise is that today “Strategy is Stuck as most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business”.

Rita believes “we require a new set of practices based on the transient competitive advantage”.  We are in a time of fast evaporating competitive advantage and we can’t spend months crafting a single strategy, we need to keep exploring and reiterating different initiatives that are more focused, leaner, more defined, more transient in their nature.

This needs more fluid, greater visualization and more customer-centric approaches and modular strategic design approaches.

So what if?

What if you prototyped business models like architects sketch buildings this is one of the main appeals of the business model canvas, outlined in the book: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, You can simply do that, sketch out new business ideas or quickly visualize existing businesses and the ‘multiple’ canvases can be used in teams as a sharing tool to structure the thinking.

What if you had a clear method to uncover what customers want to get done? How about a tool and methodology that will help you to Identify and prioritize the jobs-to-be-done? Knowing these is clearly of high value and can lead to rapidly achieving growth segments that tap into this.

Jobs-to-be-done is very fertile ground many are exploring including Clayton Christensen, Tony Ulwick and Strategyn, Mark Johnson and Innosight and plenty more. One of the best books outlining a well thought through approach to this JtbD is in Lance Bettencourts book “Service Innovation: how to go from customer needs to breakthrough services”

What if we learnt to talk  always around the Value Proposition, not that difficult part of explaining ‘our’ (boring) business strategy? Recently we have been seeing the emergence of a Value Proposition Canvas from Yves Pigneur, Alex Osterwalder and Alan Smith. This will ‘emerge’ in a book “the Value Proposition Design” due to be published sometime soon. The VP canvas dovetails into the BM canvas. It takes the JtbD concept to achieve a greater fit between the value you intent to create and the expectations your customers have.

Part of the Business model canvas proposition is extending tools to build better models and through www.strategyzer.com this web site (at present) is dedicated to working away at different tools and becoming the official Alpha web-app from the makers of Business Model Generation developing software solutions.

Also expect to see further development through the Business Model Foundry and the Strategyzer Academy that will explore and educate upon all the emerging tools and techniques being ‘crafted’ away at present. I’d recommend joining the Business model hub by the way, another from this growing business enterprise, centred on the Business Model Canvas.

Juggling, juggling and juggling.

Have you thought about “Pruning the product tree?” Luke Hohmann and his company The Innovation Games Company are providing a range of serious but fun games that can produce concepts that shift your thinking. On his ‘pruning the product tree’ the focus is not on ‘cutting’ but ‘shaping’ to arrive at products that your customers desire more and so you eventually  create a ‘new canopy’ of innovating options. They are developing a whole range of innovation games

Within organizations there needs to be greater, richer conversations – those strategic conversations that are more creative, collaborative and working more though adaptive challenges arising more constantly than ever.  Lisa Kay Soloman, who teaches Design Strategy at the California College of Arts is co-authoring a book due out next year “Moment of Impact: how to design strategic conversations that accelerate change”, published by Simon & Schuster.

Have you checked out Dave Gray, founder and CEO of Limini. Dave has authored two books Gamestorming, a practical handbook for innovators and change agents and a second book, the Connected Company, offering a strategic blueprint and roadmap for businesses who want to innovate. He is exploring a “culture map” approach to help teams understand their cultures as well.

I could go on, as there is an awful lot of fresh thinking emerging.  Just take the ‘body of work’ that Steve Blank is producing centred around a methodology for focusing around the customer, take time out to get into his manual “The Startup Owner’s Manual” written with Bob Dorf.  More and more entrepreneurs have discovered Eric Ries and his thoughts on applying continuous innovation in lean ways to create radically successful businesses which are outlined in his book “The Lean Startup”.

One could look towards “Design Thinking” with Tim Brown (CEO Ideo) traditionally leading this charge but take a look at a book written by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie “Designing for Growth: A design thinking toolkit for managers” where they lead you through the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications and cover the mind-set, techniques, and vocabulary of design thinking, so helping us to unpack the mysterious connection between design and growth

So we have an awful lot of juggling taking place

Those who have not yet picked up on Gary Hamel’s quest for change through the reinvention of management and his moonshots for management should find the time- it sets the Business scene and future agenda. Then you have Steve Denning who writes about radical management over at Forbes and I’d certainly recommend reading his recent article “The Management Revolution That’s Already Happening” where he is suggesting that today’s organizations represent a failure so deep and pervasive that there are hardly words to describe it.

 A veritable revolution in management and its design is under way.

 Steve Denning argues we are fleshing out a “new management canon” – a huge paradigm shift. He believes we are in a creative economy that generates dramatic reductions in cost, size, and time, and improvements in convenience, of products and services with new systems of infrastructure, new ways of socializing, new meaning as to how time is spent, and new ways of living these possibilities

Those of you not yet ‘plugged in’ then I’d begin, the sooner the better, as there is a whole new way of thinking going on and any movement of this potential magnitude needs supporting and exploring, especially if you share in the belief that much is out of kilter within the business world. There is a ‘certain business revolution in the air’.

Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman
“Call out the instigators
Because there’s something in the air
We’ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right

We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now”

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