Innovation and Pivots: Further Thinking

April 5, 2012

The other day I blogged about piv­ots, out­lin­ing argu­ments for and against piv­ot­ing. Piv­ot­ing is con­tro­ver­sial because there are dif­fer­ent the­o­ries of inno­va­tion, and oppos­ing beliefs about suc­cess fac­tors and likely risks.

Piv­ot­ing is con­sid­ered a healthy strate­gic maneu­ver by pro­po­nents of lean star­tups. They see piv­ots as an invalu­able course cor­rec­tion that enables star­tups to recover from poor prod­uct con­cepts, or faulty assump­tions about cus­tomers and buy­ing processes.

Crit­ics of piv­ot­ing say there are less risky approaches to inno­va­tion, such as the Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion® model patented by Strat­egyn. (ODI for short.)

A Reli­gious War over Inno­va­tion Theory?

This dis­agree­ment boils down to dif­fer­ent philoso­phies about where inno­va­tions should orig­i­nate: with ideas and novel con­cepts, or cus­tomer needs.

ODI-versus-startup-models

Star­tups: Idea-Driven Innovation

Most star­tups owe their found­ing inspi­ra­tion to a prod­uct vision that the founders want to bring to life. Dur­ing their for­ma­tive years these are idea-driven busi­nesses. Star­tups, espe­cially tech star­tups, are the chief exem­plar of idea-driven innovation.

But the prob­lem is, 90% of idea-driven star­tups will fail if they apply prod­uct devel­op­ment, sales and mar­ket­ing approaches orig­i­nally designed for large com­pa­nies. They will run out of cash before they fully under­stand why their busi­ness model isn’t work­ing, why their ideas don’t res­onate with cus­tomers. The fail­ure of this out­moded model is elo­quently described in The Startup Owner’s Man­ual, using Web­van as the poster child for how not to man­age a startup.

Hence the need for cus­tomer dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment processes that rec­og­nize the uncer­tain­ties and unknowns that are baked into entre­pre­neur­ial ven­tures. Because star­tups face so many unknowns, they must have grace­ful ways to recover from faulty assump­tions or things that are sim­ply unknow­able in advance.

Hence the pivot. Piv­ots take place when founders rec­og­nize that their cur­rent assump­tions don’t fit cus­tomer or mar­ket real­i­ties, so they need to adjust their prod­uct con­cept, pric­ing, cus­tomer selec­tion, or go-to-market strategy.

The meth­ods and prac­tices detailed in The Startup Owner’s Man­ual will help founders increase their chances of suc­cess, accord­ing to entre­pre­neur­ship thought lead­ers Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, the book’s authors. These meth­ods are intended to help founders reduce mission-critical busi­ness risks: customer/market risk, product/market fit, and the need for a repeat­able sales model and a busi­ness model that can be scaled as the com­pany grows.

Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion®

Strat­egyn has patented an inno­va­tion method they call Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion® or ODI. It is a customer-centered, dis­ci­plined approach to uncov­er­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties; one that views every­thing through the eyes of the cus­tomer. ODI starts with a rig­or­ous analy­sis of cus­tomer needs, apply­ing a jobs-to-be-done lens to the dis­cov­ery process.

Strategy’s research sug­gests that cus­tomers con­sider some­where between 50 and 150 met­rics when assess­ing how well a prod­uct or ser­vice meets their needs, in the con­text of the job-to-be-done. Com­pa­nies that under­stand those met­rics and can deliver a value propo­si­tion that sat­is­fies them, will be 5 times more likely to suc­ceed than those that oper­ate under tra­di­tional inno­va­tion the­o­ries, Strat­egyn claims. (Idea-driven inno­va­tion being one of the the­o­ries that Strat­egyn says has high fail­ure rates.)

Because of the dis­ci­plined nature of the ODI process, the need for ODI dis­cov­ery and analy­sis to pre­cede prod­uct devel­op­ment, the ODI method is more likely to appeal to estab­lished enter­prises than to star­tups. (How many star­tups do you know that rel­ish dis­ci­plined processes early in their life cycle?)

Read the Books

The good news is, both of these inno­va­tion the­o­ries are well described in books and blogs. Entre­pre­neurs and inno­va­tors can learn a lot from these mod­els by read­ing the fol­low­ing books, which I highly rec­om­mend: The Startup Owner’s Man­ual, The Lean Startup; What Cus­tomers Want, and Ser­vice Inno­va­tion. (The lat­ter two describe Outcome-Driven Innovation.)

the-startup-owners-manuallean-startup
what-customers-wantservice-innovation-book

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Tagged as: customer development, innovation methods, lean startups, ODI, pivot

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Are Pivots a Poor Way to Innovate?

April 2, 2012

Smart entre­pre­neurs run lean, agile star­tups, piv­ot­ing at a moment’s notice in response to neg­a­tive mar­ket feed­back. Piv­ots are an essen­tial part of the entrepreneur’s toolkit for “fail­ing fast,” to extend the run­way before the busi­ness runs out of resources. This has become con­ven­tional wis­dom in the startup world, at least among high-tech star­tups here on the West Coast.

But wait: busi­ness strate­gists like Jay Haynes now warn that piv­ots are “fun­da­men­tally bro­ken,” a risky foun­da­tion on which to base a startup’s inno­va­tion process (and investors’ capital):

“So the answer to the inno­va­tion prob­lem is absolutely NOT to pivot. Here’s why. In the mind of the entre­pre­neur, this leads to launch­ing before he/she really under­stands the mar­ket oppor­tu­nity and the cus­tomer needs.

— Jay Haynes

The Argu­ment in Favor of Pivoting

Piv­ots are a key ele­ment of “learn­ing by doing” — for­mu­lat­ing hypothe­ses and then test­ing them based on what works (or doesn’t work) in the mar­ket­place. Piv­ots enable open-minded founders to respond to erro­neous assump­tions before those assump­tions become so entrenched in the busi­ness model that they cause the startup to fail. Piv­ots are a form of “course correction.”

Piv­ots have emerged from an entre­pre­neur­ial busi­ness prac­tice that val­ues on-going con­ver­sa­tions with rep­re­sen­ta­tive cus­tomers, rein­forced via in-market tests once the startup has some­thing to show to poten­tial cus­tomers (such as a pro­to­type, work­ing model, demo, or a “min­i­mum viable product”).

Piv­ots are closely asso­ci­ated with the process of cus­tomer dis­cov­ery — test­ing whether the founder’s prod­uct vision matches cus­tomers’ per­cep­tions of a need that’s worth solv­ing. Erro­neous assump­tions about who the actual cus­tomer is or how much they’re will­ing to pay — the spe­cific roles or per­sonas who are moti­vated, and able to buy, the startup’s prod­uct — can also cause the need for a pivot.

Piv­ots enable the startup to recover from failed prod­uct con­cepts, as long as iter­a­tive design meth­ods and agile devel­op­ment are core capa­bil­i­ties of the busi­ness. Assum­ing that is, the founders still have enough access to cash and/or investors’ cap­i­tal to keep going.

Biz Model Customer Development

— Con­cept illus­tra­tion from con­ver­sa­tions between Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder

Piv­ots hap­pen when star­tups rec­og­nize that there’s a bad fit between what they offer, and what cus­tomers want and are will­ing to pay for. Know­ing how and when to pivot, or when to stay the course, is a smart sur­vival skill, accord­ing to entre­pre­neur­ship gurus like Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Both are authors of highly regarded how-to books for entre­pre­neurs, The Startup Owner’s Man­ual and The Lean Startup, respec­tively. Steve Blank and Eric Ries blog and speak reg­u­larly on the wis­dom of pivoting.

The rea­son for piv­ot­ing is to pre­serve pre­cious cash, cap­i­tal, devel­op­ment time and oppor­tu­nity costs to focus on just the most valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ties. Piv­ot­ing enables entre­pre­neurs to stop throw­ing good money after bad…

The Argu­ment Against Pivoting

Strate­gists like Jay Haynes argue that today’s fad­dish obses­sion with piv­ot­ing reflects a mis­taken assump­tion that cus­tomers don’t know what they want, and that there’s no effec­tive way to uncover cus­tomers’ latent needs.

“So if cus­tomers don’t know what they want, it would make sense to launch quickly, fail fast, pivot, and hope for the best.

— Jay Hanes

Haynes is co-founder and man­ag­ing direc­tor of Strat­egyn Equity Part­ners, as well as a ser­ial entre­pre­neur and investor. Strat­egyn has cre­ated and patented an inno­va­tion process called Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion® based on years of work with larger enterprises.

Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion® Instead of Pivots

Strat­egyn claims that their con­sult­ing team, when apply­ing the ODI method­ol­ogy, can achieve suc­cess rates that are 5 times bet­ter than indus­try norms for inno­va­tion. If this is indeed so, that would beat startup suc­cess rates.

Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion requires upfront research into cus­tomer needs and pri­or­i­tized areas of oppor­tu­nity. It’s a highly dis­ci­plined approach, with repeat­able meth­ods for cus­tomer inquiry, and how to trans­late the find­ings into action­able insights. Insights that can guide busi­ness lead­ers on where the com­pany should place its bets.

ODI’s Appeal for Entrepreneurs?

I would imag­ine that an ODI con­sult­ing engage­ment is pricey — quite expen­sive from the POV of a cash-strapped entrepreneur.

That said, I’ve read sev­eral books by Strategyn’s founders and there is a lot of merit to the ODI process — if you can finance this invest­ment early enough to make a dif­fer­ence. There is a very clear method­ol­ogy, based on years of prac­tice, behind ODI.

Unfor­tu­nately, the need for upfront research to fuel ODI is likely to be soundly rejected by founders who are will­ing to bet every­thing they own on the con­vic­tion that their idea will be the next Face­book… (Angel investors run into these guys all the time…)

Research-Then-Do Ver­sus Do-Then-Research: Which Is Better?

Does the argu­ment between ODI ver­sus piv­ot­ing boil down to a ques­tion of tim­ing, scope and pri­or­i­ties? When to con­duct the research, and how much? Or how well?

research-vs-pivots

ODI: Research then develop; Lean Startup: Develop then research (and pivot if you fail).

Outcome-Driven Inno­va­tion is a dis­ci­plined process that entails doing research before invest­ing in prod­uct devel­op­ment (whether for new prod­ucts or exten­sions to core prod­uct plat­forms). To be effec­tive ODI requires deep insights into cus­tomer needs and pri­or­i­ties, and the val­ues that cus­tomers asso­ciate with solv­ing those needs (what Strat­egy refers to as “jobs to be done”).

The lean startup approach advo­cates a light­weight approach to for­mu­lat­ing hypothe­ses that can be val­i­dated. Devel­op­ment efforts focus on build­ing just “the Min­i­mum Viable Prod­uct.” In prac­tice devel­op­ment pre­cedes research.

There’s no com­mon agree­ment about ideal tim­ing or effec­tive processes for cus­tomer needs research, nor how to trans­late the find­ings into clear actions, within the entre­pre­neur­ial ecosys­tem. How you decide what goes into your MVP, or assess how well the MVP res­onates with cus­tomers, is left up to the entre­pre­neurs and their investors. This is why ser­ial entre­pre­neurs are so pop­u­lar — every­one fig­ures they’ve already learned how NOT to do it…

Impli­ca­tions

In prac­ti­cal terms the real ques­tion is, which inno­va­tion model deliv­ers a supe­rior ROI to the investors, and supe­rior prod­ucts to customers?

If it’s true that ODI has a bet­ter track record, is there a way to scale the ODI method­ol­ogy so it’s fea­si­ble and finan­cially afford­able for cash-strapped star­tups? If so, the remain­ing chal­lenge is the moti­va­tional bar­rier: how to man­age pas­sion­ate entre­pre­neurs who know what the mar­ket wants, and “don’t need no stink­ing research.”

Time will tell which of these approaches to inno­va­tion is the more fruitful…

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Tagged as: customer development process, customer discovery, innovation methods, pivot, start-ups, startup

Revised on April 5, 2012

Is Wealth Enough, Or Does Purpose Matter More?

March 29, 2012

Why do peo­ple risk so much to start a busi­ness? For some, it’s all about the money, the pur­suit of fame, busi­ness celebrity sta­tus, per­sonal wealth… Oth­ers build com­pa­nies out of a sense of mis­sion: to drive soci­etal change, [click to continue…]

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Tagged as: corporate purpose

Revised on April 10, 2012

Purpose: The Secret of a Winning Brand

March 29, 2012

Exec­u­tives who focus myopi­cally on quar­terly results to the exclu­sion of all else are likely to give short shrift to Pur­pose, and yet it’s the secret behind the world’s most beloved brands.

The Heart­beat of the Brand

In the con­text of brand strat­egy, Pur­pose ener­gizes the organization’s “heart” — the inter­sec­tion of cor­po­rate strat­egy, the organization’s shared val­ues, and its fun­da­men­tal rea­son for being. Pur­pose is the “zen of the brand,” in com­pa­nies wise enough [click to continue…]

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Tagged as: corporate identity, corporate purpose

Revised on April 10, 2012

B2B Marketers: The Journey Is the Reward

February 1, 2012

If you’re a B2B mar­keter, you’re no doubt suf­fer­ing through the painful con­se­quences of buy­ers tak­ing con­trol of the pur­chas­ing process. You’re under attack from all fronts, your bud­gets are dwin­dling. Con­stant con­flicts with sales col­leagues. And just to add to the pres­sure, the suits in the C-suite demand proof (fact-based evi­dence) of how much your mar­ket­ing efforts con­tribute each quar­ter to rev­enues and margins.

Mean­while you’re bar­raged with com­pet­ing claims from tech ven­dors promis­ing mir­a­cle solu­tions, if only you’d invest in their tech­nol­ogy or ser­vices for:

  • lead nur­tur­ing, rev­enue per­for­mance man­age­ment, demand gen
  • con­tent marketing
  • social con­ver­sa­tions
  • com­mu­nity engagement
  • rep­u­ta­tion mon­i­tor­ing, social media monitoring
  • brand sto­ry­telling
  • trans­me­dia strategies

The list of alleged sil­ver bul­lets goes on and on… What’s a mar­keter to do? Where’s a smart place to start, to invest your pre­cious time, atten­tion and budget?

Mas­ter­ing the Buyer’s Journey

To drive improved rev­enue per­for­mance means pro­vid­ing buy­ers with what they need, when they want it, in their pre­ferred chan­nels. That means you must respond to what they need, based on how they make buy­ing deci­sions. As B2B mar­ket­ing expert Ardath Albee writes, you need to:

“Be found with the right infor­ma­tion in the chan­nels buy­ers prefer.

— How Online Pub­lish­ing Changes the Game, Ardath Albee

What B2B buy­ers strongly pre­fer is infor­ma­tion that’s spe­cific to their job roles, rel­e­vant to their indus­try or mar­ket­place. It takes insight-driven mar­ket­ing to respond appro­pri­ately: to know how to posi­tion the value of your offer­ing in ways that are mean­ing­ful to your buy­ers, to sup­port the busi­ness case they will even­tu­ally have to construct.

You can’t arrive at insight-driven mar­ket­ing by just sit­ting in a con­fer­ence room, hud­dled around a white­board. Despite the pres­sures to act now, act fast, you need to invest in some buyer-centric research. You need insights into each stage of the buyer’s jour­ney, across the life­cy­cle of their engage­ment with your com­pany — and that means under­stand­ing what they expect and need from you long after the sale has been made.

As Apple’s Steve Jobs famously said:

“The jour­ney is the reward.

— Steve Jobs

So here’s my ver­sion of Steve Jobs’ advice, adapted for B2B marketers:

“Mas­ter­ing the buyer’s jour­ney leads to the reward.

— Chris­tine Thomp­son and other B2B mar­ket­ing strategists

If you’re being hon­est, how well do you under­stand who your buy­ers are, the roles they play within their com­pa­nies, the pains that moti­vate them to find a bet­ter way, the fac­tors they’ll use to eval­u­ate options and busi­ness cases? In my expe­ri­ence as a con­sul­tant, few B2B com­pa­nies really under­stand how cus­tomers make buy­ing deci­sions due to the tra­di­tional myopic focus on the sales process.

If you haven’t fig­ured out how to gain these buyer-centric insights, I rec­om­mend the white paper writ­ten by Ardath Albee of Mar­ket­ing Inter­ac­tions, How Online Pub­lish­ing Changes the Game, spon­sored by Hoovers. Albee’s paper pro­vides a thought­ful overview of how B2B mar­keters need to up their game: by cen­ter­ing all activ­i­ties (includ­ing con­tent mar­ket­ing) on the buyer’s jour­ney rather than remain­ing mired in tac­tics dri­ven solely by the sales process. Accord­ing to Albee, it all starts with the right insights into the buyer per­sonas. Her paper offers both con­cep­tual advice as well as use­ful tips on where to focus first.

There are mul­ti­ple ways to get started: such as LinkedIn research, syn­di­cated research, ask­ing prob­ing ques­tions of your sales­peo­ple — and talk­ing directly to cus­tomers to learn what mat­ters to them. Con­sul­tants can help…

Painful Con­se­quences of the Sta­tus Quo for B2B Marketers

Accord­ing to a recent report by For­rester, here are some of the typ­i­cal con­se­quences of tra­di­tional B2B mar­ket­ing, approaches that haven’t responded to the new realities:

  • Only 12% of tech mar­keters say they have a “very strong” rela­tion­ship with their sales coun­ter­parts when it comes to achiev­ing align­ment on sales pipelines, processes for man­ag­ing leads, etc.
  • Half are unable to reach solid agree­ment on basic things like busi­ness targets.
  • No vis­i­bil­ity into what’s going on with the buyer (or buyer com­mit­tee) once the lead moves into the sales pipeline.
  • Chaotic engage­ment with the cus­tomer, siloed com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, incon­sis­tent mes­sages, lost opportunities.
  • Too many tools, too lit­tle inte­gra­tion, too much over­lap, wasted spend.

— Automat­ing Lead to Rev­enue Man­age­ment, by Lori Wizdo, For­rester Research, Decem­ber 9, 2011.

If you don’t take action to “mas­ter the buyer’s jour­ney” and respond appro­pri­ately, your com­pany is liable to suf­fer missed fore­casts, dis­ap­point­ing quar­terly results, angry share­hold­ers, diluted brand equity — not to men­tion on-going hos­til­ity between sales and marketing.

Net net: The more you fail to meet buy­ers’ and cus­tomers’ expec­ta­tions, the more your busi­ness will decline. If your busi­ness con­tin­ues to decline, your job is likely to be at risk. So act now — take steps to under­stand the buyer’s journey.

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Tagged as: B2B marketing, buyer personas, buyer's journey

Has Apple Defined a New Medium, Again?

January 20, 2012

Apple announced new tools to cre­ate and view iBooks on the iPad, and a new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel for dig­i­tal text­books. In doing so Apple ignited a firestorm of debate on the sub­ject of dig­i­tal books, and the future of the pub­lish­ing indus­try, book dis­tri­b­u­tion, and likely con­sumer con­sump­tion pat­terns. More impor­tantly, they set the stage for what we will some­day rec­og­nize as a new medium, a new form of con­tent in its own right.

And mean­while Apple is doing so at a time when the pub­lish­ing indus­try is at risk, with out­moded busi­ness mod­els, under attack on mul­ti­ple fronts.

More Than Just Textbooks

Apple posi­tioned their Jan­u­ary 19 announce­ment as an edu­ca­tion event, with the aim of rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try. Accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal, only 6% of text­books are deliv­ered today in dig­i­tal form, fore­casted to reach 50% by 2020. That’s a big tar­get in its own right, but I’d guess Apple’s unspo­ken aspi­ra­tions are even broader…

Well beyond what we think of as “books”

Years from now, we’ll look back at this moment and real­ize that Apple lit a fire, fuel­ing a new medium, one still to be named.

What Apple has in mind is not just a book or a text­book ren­dered dig­i­tally on an iPad. Their vision for this new type of con­tent goes well beyond dig­i­tal books, enhanced ebooks, or what­ever labels we use today.

Their vision mashes up ele­ments of movies, games, ani­ma­tions and dynamic mod­els, inter­ac­tiv­ity,  hyper­link­ing and non­lin­ear nav­i­ga­tion — key enhance­ments to the core ele­ments of sto­ry­telling, nar­ra­tive flow, design, lay­out, etc. Here are some of the core ele­ments that will drive our under­stand­ing of this new medium, as I see it.

Beyond the Book

— Source, Chris­tine Thomp­son, Inform­ing Arts ©2012

Text­books First, But Not Last

I sus­pect Apple chose the text­book as the ini­tial tar­get for rein­ven­tion because the lim­i­ta­tions of a print-based medium for multi-dimensional, com­plex or time-sensitive sub­jects are so well under­stood. Apple’s long expe­ri­ence at sell­ing to and sup­port­ing edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions affords the com­pany unique insights into what works, and what’s bro­ken, when it comes to 21st cen­tury education.

The text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try is huge, and can help finance the tri­als that will even­tu­ally shape the win­ning char­ac­ter­is­tics of this new emerg­ing medium. In North Amer­ica alone the tra­di­tional text­book pub­lish­ing indus­try gen­er­ates $12–14 bil­lion annu­ally, accord­ing to one expert (for a more con­ser­v­a­tive assump­tion: > $4 bil­lion in 2011 text­book sales, accord­ing to the WSJ today; $8 bil­lion in 2010 accord­ing to For­rester. Clearly no one agrees on the def­i­n­i­tion of the indus­try, but it’s huge.)

From Apple’s per­spec­tive (as a mas­ter of dis­rup­tive inno­va­tions), the edu­ca­tional pub­lish­ing indus­try must be a sit­ting duck, ripe for transformation.

““We are edu­cat­ing peo­ple today in the same way as we did when there was 1% as much knowledge.”

– Danny Hillis, The Econ­o­mist, March 22, 2001

That said Apple is will­ing to be a part­ner, not just a dis­rupter. Apple announced that it plans to part­ner with edu­ca­tors and pub­lish­ers (reported by the Wall Street Jour­nal today). When this part­ner­ship is pro­duc­tive, those who embrace change and can envi­sion a new medium should profit enormously.

This New Medium Requires New Tal­ents & Specialties

What will emerge is a new form of multi-faceted con­tent. This new medium will require con­tri­bu­tions from many spe­cial­ties, such as:

  • Pho­tog­ra­phers, video­g­ra­phers, musi­cians, producers
  • Design­ers, illus­tra­tors, animators
  • Art/creative direc­tors for the ensem­ble as a whole
  • Game devel­op­ers — peo­ple who know how to incor­po­rate game mechan­ics (“gam­i­fi­ca­tion”) within designed experiences
  • User expe­ri­ence and inter­ac­tion designers
  • Usabil­ity testers
  • Web devel­op­ers and pro­duc­ers (HTML5 and CSS3 experts), scripters and coders
  • Infor­ma­tion archi­tects, tax­on­omy and tag­ging specialists

And of course, the usual:

  • Writ­ers and copy­writ­ers (as well as trans­la­tors for books with global appeal)
  • Edi­tors
  • Fact check­ers
  • Tal­ent spot­ters (acqui­si­tion experts)

On the strate­gic level this new medium will require vision­ar­ies, risk tak­ing pio­neers, game chang­ers and oth­ers whose per­son­al­i­ties are prob­a­bly abhor­rent to the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing world.

Not to men­tion new mod­els for brand build­ing, social media inter­ac­tions with con­sumers, and new forms of mar­ket­ing. But that’s a whole dif­fer­ent sub­ject in its own right.

[Dis­clo­sure: I played a key role in Apple’s early days of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, but have had no involve­ment in their cur­rent activ­i­ties. The opin­ions described here are my own, based on inter­pre­ta­tions of what I’ve read and heard over the Web.]

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Tagged as: content strategy, digital publishing, digital textbooks, enhanced ebooks

Bloggers, Get Ready for “Responsive Web Designs”

January 16, 2012

With more peo­ple access­ing blogs and web­sites from smart­phones, con­tent own­ers need to check out their exist­ing page designs to ensure they are “smart­phone friendly” — opti­mized for mobile usage. Experts advo­cate “respon­sive web design” strate­gies as a way to design for web + mobile con­tent. The ques­tion is, what tools are avail­able today?

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How to Drive Innovation via Customer-Value Creation

January 12, 2012

I’ve been a fan of the Busi­ness Model Can­vas as a strate­gic enabler for orga­ni­za­tions that seek busi­ness model inno­va­tion, or those who need a sim­ple but pow­er­ful way to describe a new busi­ness con­cept. But this approach has not got­ten the atten­tion it deserves within the tech com­mu­nity. Thanks to a forth­com­ing enhance­ment, the Busi­ness Model Can­vas is now poised to become a for­mi­da­ble tool for busi­ness innovators.

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Android: Tough Love for Small Businesses

January 5, 2012

While the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Android smart­phones has improved dra­mat­i­cally, the over­all user expe­ri­ence is sur­pris­ingly uneven — bet­ter suited for con­sumer use cases than the needs of a small busi­ness owner. Here’s my take so far — and the rea­sons that ulti­mately drove me to return my Android phone and ter­mi­nate the wire­less contract.

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OMG, It’s a “Transmedia” Problem

December 2, 2011

Yes­ter­day I blogged about an emerg­ing chal­lenge fac­ing small busi­nesses — adapt­ing their web con­tent so it’s more usable and acces­si­ble for peo­ple who use smart­phones or tablets to go online. It’s amaz­ing what you can learn in a day by sim­ply focus­ing your atten­tion on a busi­ness issue. From Jakob Nielsen, the usabil­ity guru, I’ve […]

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