Podcasts about Business Model Canvas

Wie findet man die nächsten großen Innovationen? Und was macht ein erfolgreiches Investment aus? In dieser Sonderfolge der Ideencouch taucht ihr ein in die Welt eines der erfolgreichsten Venture Capitalisten Europas: Florian Schweitzer und seine Investmentfirma b2venture. Ihr kennt DeepL, das bessere Google Translate? Oder die weißen SumUp-Kartenlesegeräte beim Bäcker oder im Taxi? Hinter diesen und vielen weiteren wegweisenden Unternehmen steht b2venture als früher Investor. Doch was macht Florian Schweitzer und sein Team anders? In einem spannenden Gespräch mit Patrick erfahrt ihr nicht nur, wie b2venture mit einem Netzwerk von über 300 Business Angels vielversprechende Gründer*innen aufspürt. Florian gibt auch tiefe Einblicke in seinen eigenen Weg: Wie er 1996 als Student an der Uni St. Gallen erste Konferenzen zum Thema Unternehmertum organisierte - zu einer Zeit, als das Internet gerade erst in den Kinderschuhen steckte. Wie er durch das Platzen der Dotcom-Blase lernte, was wirklich wichtig ist beim Aufbau von Unternehmen. Und wie b2venture heute Gründer*innen dabei unterstützt, ihre Visionen Wirklichkeit werden zu lassen. Besonders spannend sind Florians Erkenntnisse zum Thema Vertrieb und Innovation: Warum war DeepL seiner Zeit so weit voraus? Wie hat SumUp den Vertrieb seiner Payment-Lösung von der Straße aus getestet? Und was macht eigentlich den Unterschied zwischen einem guten und einem herausragenden Gründer aus? Diese Sonderfolge beginnt mit einem kurzen Vorgespräch zwischen Jan und Patrick, bevor ihr das komplette Interview aus Patricks eigenem Podcast hört. Eine Folge voller wertvoller Insights für alle, die verstehen wollen, wie aus innovativen Ideen erfolgreiche Unternehmen werden.Ein besonderer Dank geht an Michael vom Tonstudio Hello Robin in Hamburg, der mit viel Expertise und zahlreichen Tricks die Tonqualität dieser Podcast-Folge optimiert hat.Über die Personen: [Gäste] Florian Schweitzer ist Gründungspartner von b2venture, einer einzigartigen Venture-Capital-Firma, die Gründer*innen mit einem Netzwerk aus Business Angels unterstützt. Zuvor gründete er START Global an der Universität St. Gallen. Unter seiner Führung hat B2Venture erfolgreiche Startups wie DeepL und SumUp unterstützt.Dr. Patrick Stähler beschäftigt sich tagtäglich mit dem Thema Geschäftsmodelle. Von ihm stammt die Idee der Business Model Canvas, er ist Autor und Speaker. Sein Buch „Das Richtige Gründen“ geht in die 6. Auflage und bringt uns bei, wie wir Erfolg haben, indem wir Nutzen schaffen und das passende Geschäftsmodell drum herum stricken. [Gastgeber] Dr. Jan Evers ist erfahrenerGründungsberater und selbst Unternehmer. Jan berät seit fast 20 Jahren Banken und Ministerien sowie wachstumsstarke Gründer*innen und Mittelständler –als Aufsichtsrat, Business Angel und Miteigentümer. Mehr Infos zu Jan: https://everest-x.de/profil/ [Redaktion] Gesa Holz [Technische Bearbeitung] Erik UhlendorfWeitere Themen: ⁠⁠LaborX Hamburg⁠⁠ – ⁠⁠Ideencouch #66 Geschäftsmodellarbeit⁠⁠ – ⁠⁠Ideencouch #106: Jobrad⁠⁠ – ⁠⁠Ideencouch #113: Tante Enso Landen⁠⁠ -- ⁠⁠Ideencouch #100: Das Geschäftsmodell von 1KOMMA5°⁠⁠ - ⁠⁠Ideencouch #71 – Digitale Geschäftsmodelle⁠⁠ -- Ideencouch #103 Kapitalbeschaffung für Gründer*innen – Ideencouch #64 Company Builder Über die Ideencouch: Die Ideencouch ist ein Podcast von EVEREST. Wenn du Gründer*in bist, dich Startups faszinieren oder du als Unternehmer*in an deinem eigenen Unternehmen arbeitest, ist dieser Podcast genau der richtige für dich. Aus den Gesprächen zwischen Jan und seinen Gästen wirst du praktisches Wissen, anwendbare Erkenntnisse und kreative Anregungen für deinen Unternehmer*innen-Alltag mitnehmen. -- Du möchtest uns Feedback geben oder selbst Gast im Podcast sein? Schreib uns eine E-Mail an an info@laborx-hamburg.de Wir freuen uns auf deine Nachricht!  -- Partner -- LaborX -- Gründerplattform -- Firmenhilfe   -- SmartBusinessPlan

Welcome to the WealthBuilders Podcast as Karen Conrad Metcalfe and Ray Patterson discuss how to know when your business needs a change.This episode takes a deep dive into the Business Model Canvas (BMC), exploring how this powerful tool can help you understand, grow, and pivot your businesses for success. Learn how successful businesses benefit by remaining flexible, documenting processes, and focusing on the delivery of value to your customers. Tune in to learn the key components of the BMC to refine your business strategies. Pivoting for Success: Insights From the Business Model CanvasMore Resources:April Real Estate Workshophttps://billyepperhart.lpages.co/april-2025-real-estate-workshop/Financial Breakthrough Free e-Booklethttps://www.wealthbuilders.org/break-through

Habt ihr euch schon mal gefragt, warum in Deutschland ständig zu weißer Farbe gegriffen wird, während in England mutig dunkle Töne die Wände zieren? In dieser Folge der Ideenküche tauchen Jan und Patrick tief in das faszinierende Geschäftsmodell von Miss Pompadour ein - einem Unternehmen, das weit mehr verkauft als nur Farbe. Die beiden beleuchten, warum dieses Konzept so erfolgreich ist: Miss Pompadour inspiriert, motiviert und bringt anderen bei, wie sie Möbel und Räume schöner machen können - und verkauft ihnen alles, was sie dafür brauchen. Es geht nicht um das Produkt selbst, sondern um die emotionalen "Jobs to be done". In einer hektischen Welt sehnen wir uns nach Flow-Erlebnissen und kreativer Selbstverwirklichung. Patrick erklärt das "Knowledge Paradox": Experten wissen oft so viel, dass sie es nicht verständlich erklären können. Stattdessen setzt Miss Pompadour auf die Kraft der Peer-Gruppe - Menschen, die selbst einmal Anfänger waren. "Die Peer-Gruppe hat eine unglaubliche Bedeutung und höhere Akzeptanz als Fachexperten," betont Patrick. Die Folge zeigt auch, wie Miss Pompadour zufriedene Kunden zu Influencern und zum Teil ihres Supports macht und welchen Wert langfristige Partnerschaften haben. Ein echter Augenöffner für alle, die ihr Geschäftsmodell überdenken wollen! Denn im wachsenden DIY-Trend stecken enorme Geschäftsmodellchancen - vorausgesetzt, man versteht: Erfolgreiche Unternehmen verkaufen nicht nur Produkte, sondern erfüllen tiefe emotionale Bedürfnisse ihrer Kund*innen. Über die Personen: [Gast] ⁠Dr. Patrick Stähler ⁠beschäftigt sich tagtäglich mit dem Thema Geschäftsmodelle. Von ihm stammt die Idee der Business Model Canvas, er ist Autor und Speaker. Sein Buch „⁠Das Richtige Gründen⁠“ geht in die 6. Auflage und bringt uns bei, wie wir Erfolg haben, indem wir Nutzen schaffen und das passende Geschäftsmodell drum herum stricken. [Gastgeber] Dr. Jan Evers ist erfahrener Gründungsberater und selbst Unternehmer. Jan berät seit fast 20 Jahren Banken und Ministerien sowie wachstumsstarke Gründer*innen und Mittelständler – als Aufsichtsrat, Business Angel und Miteigentümer. Mehr Infos zu Jan:⁠ ⁠⁠https://everest-x.de/profil/⁠⁠ ⁠. [Redaktion] Gesa Holz, Sarah Bechtloff [Technische Bearbeitung] Erik UhlendorfWeitere Themen: ⁠LaborX Hamburg⁠ – ⁠Ideencouch #66 Geschäftsmodellarbeit⁠ – ⁠Ideencouch #106: Jobrad⁠ – ⁠Ideencouch #113: Tante Enso Landen⁠ -- ⁠Ideencouch #100: Das Geschäftsmodell von 1KOMMA5°⁠ - ⁠Ideencouch #110 - Zirkuläres Bauen⁠ –  ⁠Ideencouch #71 – Digitale Geschäftsmodelle⁠ Über die Ideencouch: Die Ideencouch ist ein Podcast von EVEREST. Wenn du Gründer*in bist, dich Startups faszinieren oder du als Unternehmer*in an deinem eigenen Unternehmen arbeitest, ist dieser Podcast genau der richtige für dich. Aus den Gesprächen zwischen Jan und seinen Gästen wirst du praktisches Wissen, anwendbare Erkenntnisse und kreative Anregungen für deinen Unternehmer*innen-Alltag mitnehmen. -- Du möchtest uns Feedback geben oder selbst Gast im Podcast sein? Schreib uns eine E-Mail an ⁠info@laborx-hamburg.de⁠  Wir freuen uns auf deine Nachricht!  -- Partner -- ⁠LaborX ⁠-- ⁠ Gründerplattform ⁠-- ⁠ Firmenhilfe  ⁠

Struggling to sort through a mountain of ideas? In this episode of the Honeypot Podcast, Alexander Wennerberg and Fredrik Heghammar dive deep into the crucial step of prioritization in idea management. Learn how to effectively evaluate and rank your team's suggestions using powerful frameworks like the "Three Lenses of Innovation" (viability, feasibility, desirability) and the "Action Board" (impact vs. effort).We discuss practical strategies for involving the right stakeholders, avoiding common pitfalls, and ensuring that your organization focuses on the most impactful initiatives. Discover how to move beyond consensus and implement data-driven decision-making to turn your best ideas into reality.Chapters:00:00 Introduction01:07 Design Thinking and Prioritization02:03 The Four Pillars of Idea Management03:21 The Three Lenses of Innovation (Viability, Feasibility, Desirability)05:47 The Magic Number Three and Google's Criteria06:38 The Action Board: Impact vs. Effort07:40 Eisenhower Matrix and Simplification09:32 Overcoming Complex Processes11:38 The Importance of Data and Information13:17 Risk Minimization and Prioritization15:32 Involving the Right People in Prioritization17:50 Business Model Canvas and Stress Testing Ideas20:13 Scaling Ideas and Finding Solutions22:16 Using Hives for Tailored Workflows23:57 Comparing Management and Employee Perspectives26:46 The Importance of Daily Idea Evaluation27:06 Final Recommendations: Estimation and Simplicity#IdeaManagement #Innovation #Prioritization #DesignThinking #BusinessStrategy #ProductManagement #ProjectManagement #HivesCo #Entrepreneurship #StartupTips #EmployeeIdeas #EmployeeSuggestions #ContinuousImprovementCheck out more on idea management at Hives.co!

Send us a textStruggling to make your construction business consistently profitable? In this episode, Wade and Stephen introduce the Business Model Canvas, a strategic tool that can redefine how you manage and grow your construction company. Discover how to identify your ideal customers, clarify your unique value proposition, streamline value delivery, and uncover growth opportunities. Learn the nine key segments of this powerful model and how to apply them to your contracting business for sustained success.Subscribe to get notified as soon as new episodes go live!Topics we cover in this episode include:01:31 The Power of the Business Model Canvas05:15 Customer Segments: Identifying Your Ideal Client08:08 Value Proposition: What Makes You Unique?11:17 Channels: Reaching Your Clients12:24 Customer Relationships: Building and Maintaining Connections13:51 Revenue Streams: How Your Business Makes Money15:37 Key Resources: Critical Assets for Success17:24 Key Activities: Essential Business Processes18:41 Key Partnerships: Working With Others20:43 Cost Structure: Where Does the Money Go?LINKSDownload your free Business Model CanvasVisit the episode page for more details and a transcript of the showTake the FREE Construction Company Health EvaluationJoin the Profit First for Construction community!Find all episodes and related links at ContractorSuccessForum.com.Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/CarpenterCPAs FIND US ONLINEWade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.comStephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Send us a textStruggling to make your construction business consistently profitable? In this episode, Wade and Stephen introduce the Business Model Canvas, a strategic tool that can redefine how you manage and grow your construction company. Discover how to identify your ideal customers, clarify your unique value proposition, streamline value delivery, and uncover growth opportunities. Learn the nine key segments of this powerful model and how to apply them to your contracting business for sustained success.Subscribe to get notified as soon as new episodes go live!Topics we cover in this episode include:01:31 The Power of the Business Model Canvas05:15 Customer Segments: Identifying Your Ideal Client08:08 Value Proposition: What Makes You Unique?11:17 Channels: Reaching Your Clients12:24 Customer Relationships: Building and Maintaining Connections13:51 Revenue Streams: How Your Business Makes Money15:37 Key Resources: Critical Assets for Success17:24 Key Activities: Essential Business Processes18:41 Key Partnerships: Working With Others20:43 Cost Structure: Where Does the Money Go?LINKSDownload your free Business Model CanvasVisit the episode page for more details and a transcript of the showTake the FREE Construction Company Health EvaluationJoin the Profit First for Construction community!Find all episodes and related links at ContractorSuccessForum.com.Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/CarpenterCPAs FIND US ONLINEWade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.comStephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Apakah bisnis Anda sudah berjalan optimal? Atau justru masih bingung bagaimana menyusun strategi yang solid? Di episode podcast kali ini, kita akan membongkar rahasia Business Model Canvas, sebuah alat sederhana tapi luar biasa efektif dalam memahami dan mengembangkan bisnis.Dalam waktu hanya 5 menit, Anda akan mendapatkan wawasan tentang bagaimana bisnis itu sebenarnya "berjalan", mulai dari customer segment, value proposition, channel, revenue stream, hingga cost structure. Kita juga akan membahas bagaimana lingkungan eksternal seperti tren industri, regulasi, hingga kekuatan pasar bisa memengaruhi bisnis Anda.Dengan contoh nyata, seperti bagaimana Google mengelola value proposition-nya, episode ini akan membantu Anda melihat bisnis dari perspektif yang lebih strategis. Apapun bisnis Anda, Business Model Canvas akan menjadi alat yang bisa membawa bisnis ke level berikutnya.

Send me a Text Message. The Business Model Canvas is a creative, visual tool that helps makers and indie business owners gain clarity and structure in their business. In this episode, I explore how yarn dyers, pattern designers, and shop owners can use it to grow sustainably. Tune in now and start crafting your business with confidence!

In this engaging episode, we take a deep dive into strategy and leadership, exploring how businesses analyze, plan, and adapt in today's dynamic world. From the historical roots of strategy (did you know it comes from the Greek word strategos?) to modern applications in global corporations like Apple and Spotify, this episode breaks down the fundamentals of strategic success.

Wie macht man aus drei etablierten Dingen etwas völlig Neues? Das zeigt SumUp eindrucksvoll. In dieser Folge der Ideencouch analysieren Jan und Patrick das Geschäftsmodell des Fintech-Unternehmens, das den Zahlungsverkehr revolutioniert hat. Die beiden tauchen tief ein in die Erfolgsgeschichte eines Startups, das dort erfolgreich ist, wo andere keinen Markt sahen: bei kleinen Händlern, auf Märkten und in Cafés. Mit ihrem kompakten Kartenlesegerät und der dahinterliegenden Technologie ermöglicht SumUp bargeldloses Bezahlen für alle - einfach und schön designed. Während traditionelle Banken den Zahlungsverkehr jahrzehntelang als notwendiges Übel betrachteten, erkannte SumUp das Potenzial und baute einen völlig neuen Vertriebsansatz auf. Patrick und Jan diskutieren, wie wichtig der Zahlungsverkehr heute ist - von der Autowäsche in Norwegen bis zum Bauernhof-Shop in der Schweiz. Sie zeigen auf, warum hinter der vermeintlichen Einfachheit harte Entwicklungsarbeit steckt und was andere Unternehmen von SumUp lernen können. Eine spannende Analyse eines Unternehmens, das beweist: Manchmal muss man einen Markt erst schaffen, bevor man ihn erobern kann. Über die Personen: [Gast] Dr. Patrick Stähler beschäftigt sich tagtäglich mit dem Thema Geschäftsmodelle. Von ihm stammt die Idee der Business Model Canvas, er ist Autor und Speaker. Sein Buch „Das Richtige Gründen“ geht in die 6. Auflage und bringt uns bei, wie wir Erfolg haben, indem wir Nutzen schaffen und das passende Geschäftsmodell drum herum stricken.  [Gastgeber] Dr. Jan Evers ist erfahrener Gründungsberater und selbst Unternehmer. Jan berät seit fast 20 Jahren Banken und Ministerien sowie wachstumsstarke Gründer*innen und Mittelständler – als Aufsichtsrat, Business Angel und Miteigentümer. Mehr Infos zu Jan: https://everest-x.de/profil/ . [Redaktion] Gesa Holz, Sarah Bechtloff [Technische Bearbeitung] Erik Uhlendorf Weitere Themen: LaborX Hamburg – Ideencouch #66 Geschäftsmodellarbeit – Ideencouch #106: Jobrad – Ideencouch #113: Tante Enso Landen -- Ideencouch #100: Das Geschäftsmodell von 1KOMMA5° - Ideencouch #110 - Zirkuläres Bauen –  Ideencouch #71 – Digitale Geschäftsmodelle Über die Ideencouch: Die Ideencouch ist ein Podcast von EVEREST. Wenn du Gründer*in bist, dich Startups faszinieren oder du als Unternehmer*in an deinem eigenen Unternehmen arbeitest, ist dieser Podcast genau der richtige für dich. Aus den Gesprächen zwischen Jan und seinen Gästen wirst du praktisches Wissen, anwendbare Erkenntnisse und kreative Anregungen für deinen Unternehmer*innen-Alltag mitnehmen. -- Du möchtest uns Feedback geben oder selbst Gast im Podcast sein? Schreib uns eine E-Mail an info@laborx-hamburg.de  Wir freuen uns auf deine Nachricht!  -- Partner -- LaborX --  Gründerplattform --  Firmenhilfe  

The Business of Meetings – Episode 250: Revolutionizing Business Models: Insights for the Meetings and Events Industry with Alex Osterwalder We are delighted to welcome Alex Osterwalder as our guest today. Alex is the visionary behind the groundbreaking Business Model Canvas and the founder and CEO of Strategyzer.  Join us as Alex takes us through his journey, from presenting his doctoral dissertation on business models to developing innovative tools, highlighting the power of simplicity and the value of rigorous testing. His Journey from PhD to Strategyzer Alex began his journey with a doctoral dissertation on business models, supervised by Eve Pina. Surprised by the interest his thesis received online, Alex decided to co-write a book with Eve. They self-published their book and crowdfunded the project before crowdfunding became mainstream. Their success laid the groundwork for Strategyzer. Special Offer Mentioned: https://strategyzer.com/business-of-meetings Connect with Eric Rozenberg LinkedIn Facebook Instagram Website Connect with Alex Osterwalder On LinkedIn Strategyzer  

Khởi nghiệp là một hành trình đầy thử thách, nhưng nếu bạn biết cách xác định mục tiêu tài chính, làm việc với niềm đam mê và cung cấp sản phẩm hữu ích, bạn sẽ dễ dàng vượt qua khó khăn và đạt thành công. Hãy áp dụng mô hình Business Model Canvas để xây dựng chiến lược kinh doanh bền vững ngay từ đầu. Cùng lắng nghe để khám phá bí quyết khởi nghiệp hiệu quả! Audio được trích từ chương trình Đánh Thức Sự Giàu Có 66 tại Hà Nội. Bạn có thể dăng ký tham gia để có thể trở nên giàu có - khỏe mạnh - hạnh phúc hơn tại đây: https://www.danhthucsugiauco.com/now?utm_source=Podcast&utm_medium=des&utm_content=o1ifqmyErF0&pke_mkter=90a404f3-ef18-4528-aeb6-5110621e6de5

Ever felt swamped by the myriad frameworks in product management? We get into all of the details on the pros, the cons (hello imposter syndrome), and how to use frameworks effectively. Our guest is Ed Walsh. Ed is the Head of Product at Zapmap - the UK's leading EV charging platform shares all of his views in this episode. Discover why frameworks aren't one-size-fits-all, when they're genuinely useful, and how they can sometimes hinder more than help. Ed spills the beans on his favourite tools like the Business Model Canvas and Jobs to be Done, and offers candid advice on avoiding common pitfalls. Whether you're a startup hustler or a corporate climber, this chat is packed with invaluable insights that'll help you lead your team more effectively. 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome 00:30 The Overwhelming World of Product Frameworks 01:51 The Role of Frameworks in Career Development 03:20 Advice for Using Frameworks Effectively 04:22 Understanding the Purpose of Frameworks 05:39 Identifying and Solving Problems with Frameworks 07:54 Transitioning Away from Framework Dependence 13:04 The Downsides of Over-Reliance on Frameworks 15:33 Principle-Based Leadership and Framework Flexibility 22:18 Favorite Frameworks and Their Applications 25:26 Frameworks in Startups vs. Big Corporates 27:15 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Ed is an incredible coach in the product world, if you'd love to see more of his views - you can connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-walsh-61223a47/

In this episode of Let's Talk Marketing with NDUB, Nathan A. Webster discusses his departure from the role of Executive Director at OAME, sharing the reasons behind his decision. He highlights the lack of a succession plan, ineffective decision-making processes, and feeling undervalued in his role. Nathan emphasizes the importance of having a clear strategy and valuing expertise in leadership positions. He reflects on his journey and expresses optimism for the future as he returns to his work as a marketing and organizational consultant. Business Model Canvas: https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas Watch the full podcast on YouTube. NDUB Brand | NW & Associates, LLC | Conference:  https://letsconnectpnw.com/  

In dieser Episode von Innovate or Cry diskutieren Manuel Kreutz und Babak Zeini die Bedeutung und die Methoden der Geschäftsmodellentwicklung. Sie beleuchten die Notwendigkeit neuer Geschäftsmodelle in der heutigen Zeit, die Rolle des Business Model Canvas als Strukturwerkzeug und die häufigsten Fehler, die bei der Entwicklung von Geschäftsmodellen gemacht werden. Wir geben Einblicke in die Anfänge unserer gemeinsamen Agentur und wie wir den Business Model Canvas eingesetzt haben. Zudem thematisieren wir erfolgreiche Beispiele und die Herausforderungen von Plattformgeschäftsmodellen. Zum Schluss kommen wir auf unser aktuelles Lieblingsthema (an dem wir nie vorbeikommen) und diskutieren zukünftige Trends und die Integration von KI in die Geschäftsmodellentwicklung.Kapitel00:00 Einführung in die Geschäftsmodellentwicklung03:02 Die Notwendigkeit neuer Geschäftsmodelle06:03 Innovationshöhen und Geschäftsmodelloptimierung08:57 Business Model Canvas als Strukturwerkzeug11:54 Praktische Anwendung des Business Model Canvas14:56 Marktanalyse und Rahmenbedingungen17:46 Iterativer Prozess der Geschäftsmodellentwicklung20:52 Fehler bei der Geschäftsmodellentwicklung24:13 Kardinalsfehler in der Geschäftsmodellentwicklung27:05 Plattformgeschäftsmodelle und deren Herausforderungen30:07 Beispiele erfolgreicher Geschäftsmodelle33:05 Fazit und Ausblick auf zukünftige Trends Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Cracknell James possesses a wealth of experience across diverse industries. With a 30-year tenure in finance and capital markets, he has consistently led change initiatives, adopted new business models to match the customers' needs and devised pioneering solutions to prevailing challenges. Since 2011, he has been actively investing in and nurturing businesses in Essex. He focuses on The Weave, a pioneering startup fostering an ecosystem business model to bolster the entrepreneurial community and arrest founder burnout. As a catalyst for innovation, James was instrumental in developing and delivering the iTeams challenge events for the University of Essex and has delivered and participated in multiple hackathons and sprints. He is an entrepreneur in residence, where he mentors students and facilitates workshops whilst supporting the startup team. Trained in utilising the Business Model Canvas, he holds an MSc in Systems Thinking with a specialisation in systemic innovation.www.wearetheweave.co.uk/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/james-cracknell-founder-mark-stephen-pooler

In dieser Folge tauchen Jan und Patrick in das Geschäftsmodell von Tante Enso ein, einer innovativen Gründung, das den klassischen Tante-Emma-Laden ins digitale Zeitalter bringt. Mit einer Mischung aus Genossenschaftsgedanken, moderner Technologie und lokalem Engagement möchte Tante Enso die Nahversorgung in ländlichen Regionen neu beleben. Jan und Patrick diskutieren, wie Tante Enso durch clevere Kundenbindung, flexible Öffnungszeiten und ein hybrides Online-Offline-Konzept den Spagat zwischen Tradition und Moderne meistert. Dabei geht es nicht nur um Einkaufen, sondern um die Wiederbelebung ganzer Dorfkerne! Patrick betont, wie wichtig es ist, Dörfer neu zu denken und eine lebenswerte Infrastruktur zu schaffen. Von Genossenschaftsanteilen über personallosen 24/7-Zugang bis hin zur Wunsch-Kreidetafel - Tante Enso zeigt, wie man mit kreativen Ideen und Gemeinschaftssinn dem Lädensterben auf dem Land entgegenwirken kann. Ob Skalierbarkeit, Kundenbindung oder der Umgang mit lokalen Behörden - diese Folge ist vollgepackt mit wertvollen Insights für angehende Gründer*innen. Hör rein und lass dich inspirieren! Über die Personen: [Gast] Dr. Patrick Stähler beschäftigt sich tagtäglich mit dem Thema Geschäftsmodelle. Von ihm stammt die Idee der Business Model Canvas, er ist Autor und Speaker. Sein Buch „Das Richtige Gründen“ geht in die 6. Auflage und bringt uns bei, wie wir Erfolg haben, indem wir Nutzen schaffen und das passende Geschäftsmodell drum herum stricken.  [Gastgeber] Dr. Jan Evers ist erfahrener Gründungsberater und selbst Unternehmer. Jan berät seit fast 20 Jahren Banken und Ministerien sowie wachstumsstarke Gründer*innen und Mittelständler – als Aufsichtsrat, Business Angel und Miteigentümer. Mehr Infos zu Jan: https://everest-x.de/profil/ [Redaktion] Gesa Holz, Sarah Bechtloff [Technische Bearbeitung] Erik Uhlendorf Weitere Themen: LaborX Hamburg – Ideencouch #66 Geschäftsmodellarbeit –Ideencouch #100: Das Geschäftsmodell von 1KOMMA5° - Ideencouch #110 - Zirkuläres Bauen –  Ideencouch #71 – Digitale Geschäftsmodelle Über die Ideencouch: Die Ideencouch ist ein Podcast von EVEREST. Wenn du Gründer*in bist, dich Startups faszinieren oder du als Unternehmer*in an deinem eigenen Unternehmen arbeitest, ist dieser Podcast genau der richtige für dich. Aus den Gesprächen zwischen Jan und seinen Gästen wirst du praktisches Wissen, anwendbare Erkenntnisse und kreative Anregungen für deinen Unternehmer*innen-Alltag mitnehmen. -- Du möchtest uns Feedback geben oder selbst Gast im Podcast sein? Schreib uns eine E-Mail an an info@laborx-hamburg.de Wir freuen uns auf deine Nachricht!  -- Partner -- LaborX -  Gründerplattform --  Firmenhilfe  

Today's WealthBuilders Podcast spotlights a new member of the Business Coaching team, Ray Patterson. He is the coordinator for Charis Business School and works closely with Director Billy Epperhart, and Karen Conrad Metcalfe, Assistant Director of Charis Business School.   The key focus of today's discussion is the Business Model Canvas, which is a core element in WealthBuilders and the Charis Business School. Ray initially struggled to understand the BMC until the Holy Spirit opened his eyes to its true value. This episode offers a wealth of wisdom from Ray's extensive experience, blending business acumen with a spiritual perspective on entrepreneurship and leadership.   Tune in for practical advice and encouragement to invest in resources that will help you succeed in business God's way. Get A Supernatural Understanding of the Business Model Canvas

Today's WealthBuilders Podcast spotlights a new member of the Business Coaching team, Ray Patterson. He is the coordinator for Charis Business School and works closely with Director Billy Epperhart, and Karen Conrad Metcalfe, Assistant Director of Charis Business School.   The key focus of today's discussion is the Business Model Canvas, which is a core element in WealthBuilders and the Charis Business School. Ray initially struggled to understand the BMC until the Holy Spirit opened his eyes to its true value. This episode offers a wealth of wisdom from Ray's extensive experience, blending business acumen with a spiritual perspective on entrepreneurship and leadership.   Tune in for practical advice and encouragement to invest in resources that will help you succeed in business God's way. Get A Supernatural Understanding of the Business Model Canvas

As Associate Dean & Chair of Business at Montreat College's School of Adult and Graduate Studies, Dr. Paul Gratton is in a perfect position to help coaches think about how to develop their business, as well as give their clients a template for designing the client's business. Paul takes us through all nine areas of the model: Key activities Key resources Key partners Value Propositions Customer segments Channels Customer relationships Cost Structure Revenue Streams Here is a link to a Business Model Canvas template. You can hear more from Paul on our previously released podcasts: 278 Thirteen Competencies Required for Starting Your Own Practice with Paul Gratton - Part 2 277 Thirteen Competencies Required for Starting Your Own Practice with Paul Gratton - Part 1 243 Complex Systems with Paul Gratton FOLLOW US: LinkedIn:http://www.linkedin.com/company/coach-approach-ministries Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coach.approach.ministries Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@coachapproachministries7538 Website: www.coachapproachministries.org

Model biznesowy soloprzedsiębiorcy to prosty sposób, żeby lepiej zrozumieć, jak działa twoja firma. Dzięki niemu zaplanujesz biznes, który zamierzasz zbudować , uporządkujesz działającą firmę i rozwiniesz swoją działalność. Dowiedz się, jak wykorzystać narzędzie Business Model Canvas w swojej firmie.Pełny opis odcinka MWF 472: https://l.malawielkafirma.pl/p-472Przydatne linki:- E-book „Jak zdobyć klienta” https://malawielkafirma.pl/jak-zdobyc-klienta-ebook/- Zamów reklamę w newsletterze Soloprzedsiebiorca.pl https://malawielkafirma.pl/reklama-w-newsletterze/Posłuchaj też:Jak zostać soloprzedsiębiorcą, zdobyć tysiące klientów i zarabiać także wtedy, gdy nie pracujesz https://l.malawielkafirma.pl/p-47110 rzeczy, których potrzebuje każdy soloprzedsiębiorca. Bez nich piekielnie trudno osiągnąć sukces https://l.malawielkafirma.pl/p-470251: Gdzie będzie twoja firma za pięć lat? | Paweł Tkaczyk https://l.malawielkafirma.pl/p-251Bądźmy w kontakcie:Newsletter: https://l.soloprzedsiebiorca.pl/p-472LinkedIn: https://malawielkafirma.pl/linkedinYouTube: https://l.malawielkafirma.pl/p-youtube

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started.Ranked No. 4 of the Thinkers50 list of the most influential management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. He invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies.Strategyzer, Osterwalder's company, provides online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation.His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, Testing Business Ideas and The Invincible Company. The Profitable NutritionistMore clients, more money, more impact and more freedom without relying on social mediaListen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the Show.

SummaryThe conversation explores three main topics: business model resilience, AI, and environmental sustainability. The accessibility and democratisation of AI tools have made a significant impact on innovation and value creation. AI has the potential to propose better value propositions and even replace human managers. The integration of AI tools in consulting processes has resulted in faster results and improved efficiency. However, the development of better value propositions through the integration of different data sources is still a work in progress. In this conversation, Alex and Dominic discuss the potential of AI in innovation and business processes. They explore the idea of using AI to automate customer interviews and the impact it can have on the speed and efficiency of innovation. They also touch on the importance of environmental sustainability and the need for new business models that harmonize profit and impact. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of AI and the importance of regulation.Keywordsbusiness model resilience, AI, environmental sustainability, accessibility, democratisation, innovation, value creation, value propositions, AI tools, consulting processes, data sources, AI, innovation, business processes, customer interviews, speed, efficiency, environmental sustainability, business models, profit, impact, regulationTakeawaysThe accessibility and democratization of AI tools have revolutionized innovation and value creation.AI has the potential to propose better value propositions and even replace human managers.The integration of AI tools in consulting processes has resulted in faster results and improved efficiency.The development of better value propositions through the integration of different data sources is still a work in progress. AI can greatly speed up the innovation process by automating tasks like customer interviews.Businesses need to embrace environmental sustainability and find new business models that harmonise profit and impact.Financial sustainability and resilient revenue models are crucial for the success of a business.Experimentation with pricing and revenue streams is essential for business growth.The rapid pace of change in AI presents both challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators.Regulation is necessary to ensure the responsible and ethical use of AI.About Alex OsterwalderAlex Osterwalder is ranked in the top 10 on the Thinkers50 list of management thinkers worldwide. He is passionate about simplifying the complex challenges that today's leaders face. Along with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas and other practical tools, which are now used by millions of practitioners around the globe.Strategyzer, the company Alex co-founded, provides technology-enabled innovation services to leading organisations, including Colgate-Palmolive, MasterCard and Merck. Alex spends most of his time advising leaders on how to scale their innovation efforts and get results. They already have the assets but lack the organisational design and innovation culture.His books include Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and High-Impact Tools for Teams. Together with his children he created Biz4Kids, a comic book to promote entrepreneurship.Chapters02:22 The Impact of AI on Innovation and Value Creation05:10 The Potential of AI in Proposing Value Propositions10:42 Challenges in Developing Better Value Propositions with AI30:30 Harmonising Profit and Impact: The Future of Business...

In een snel veranderende wereld moet je als ondernemer of leider voortdurend je businessmodel aanpassen. Want alleen dan blijf je op lange termijn succesvol. Patrick van der Pijl is dé specialist in Business Model Innovatie. Hij schreef er diverse boeken over, is host van Baanbrekende Business Modellen op BNR en CEO van Business Models Inc. Patrick helpt organisaties om gaten in de markt te vinden en er een succesvol business model omheen te bouwen. We vroegen hem:Hoe innoveer je terwijl je ook nog een bedrijf te runnen hebt?Hoe ontwikkel je nieuwe ideeën op basis van de feedback van klanten? Wat moet je vooral wel en niet doen als je een idee wil ‘valideren'? Ook spreken we Patrick over de learning circles die hij samen met DenkProducties ontwikkelde voor Amsterdam Business Forum. Een slimme manier om extra veel te leren tijdens een seminar. Shownotes:Patrick van der Pijl: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppijl/?originalSubdomain=nlPatricks bedrijf: https://www.businessmodelsinc.com/enBoeken van Patrick van der Pijl: https://www.managementboek.nl/auteur/19119/patrick-van-der-pijlPodcast Baanbrekende Businessmodellen: https://www.bnr.nl/podcast/baanbrekende-businessmodellen

 Bio: Pete Newell Pete Newell is a nationally recognized innovation expert whose work is transforming how the  government and other large organizations compete and drive growth.  He is the CEO of BMNT, an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage tech accelerator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in national security, state and local governments, and beyond. Founded in Silicon Valley, BMNT has offices in Palo Alto, Washington DC, Austin, London, and Canberra. BMNT uses a framework, called H4X®, to drive innovation at speed. H4X® is an adaptation of the problem curation techniques honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the best practices employed by successful Silicon Valley startups. The result is a disciplined, evidence-based, data-driven process for connecting innovation activities into an accountable system that delivers solutions and overcome obstacles to innovation. Pete is a founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic program taught at 47+ universities in the U.S., as well as universities in the UK and Australia. H4D® focuses on solving national security problems. It has in turned created a series of sister courses – Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Oceans, Hacking for Sustainability, Hacking for Local and others – that use the H4X® framework to solve critical real-world problems while providing students with a platform to gain crucial problem-solving experience while performing a national service. Pete continues to advise and teach the original H4D® course at Stanford University with Steve Blank. In addition, Pete is Co-Founder and Board Director of The Common Mission Project, the 501c3 non-profit responsible for creating an international network of mission-driven entrepreneurs, including through programs like H4D®. Prior to joining BMNT, Pete served as the Director of the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF).  Reporting directly to the senior leadership of the Army, he was charged with rapidly finding, integrating, and employing solutions to emerging problems faced by Soldiers on the battlefield. From 2010 to 2013 Pete led the REF in the investment of over $1.4B in efforts designed to counter the effects of improvised explosive devices, reduce small units exposure to suicide bombers and rocket attacks and to reduce their reliance on long resupply chains. He was responsible for the Army's first deployment of mobile manufacturing labs as well as the use of smart phones merged with tactical radio networks. Pete retired from the US Army as a Colonel in 2013. During his 32 years in uniform he served as both an enlisted national guardsman and as an active duty officer. He commanded Infantry units at the platoon through brigade level, while performing special operations, combat, and peace support operations in Panama, Kosovo, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an Army Ranger who has received numerous awards to include the Silver Star and Presidential Unit Citation. Pete holds a BS from Kansas State University, an MS from the US Army Command & General Staff College, an MS from the National Defense University and advanced certificates from the MIT Sloan School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Bio: Dr Alison Hawks Dr. Alison Hawks is one of the leading experts advancing public sector innovation. A researcher and academic-turned-entrepreneur, she is the co-founder and CEO of BMNT, Ltd., the innovation company that is changing how public sector innovation happens; and Chair of the Common Mission Project UK, BMNT's charitable partner that guides mission-driven entrepreneurial education in the UK. Dr. Hawks co-founded BMNT Ltd with (Ret) Col Pete Newell, the CEO of BMNT, Inc., in 2019 to bring BMNT's proven innovation approach to the UK market. Under her leadership BMNT has become a trusted innovation partner across all single Services of Defence, the Cabinet Office, and the national security community. She has also helped change how real-world government challenges are addressed in the UK, launching the “Hacking for” academic programmes created in the U.S. These courses that teach university students how to use modern entrepreneurial tools and techniques to solve problems alongside government at startup speed. As a result of her efforts, 14 UK universities are offering Hacking for the Ministry of Defence, Hacking for Sustainability and Hacking for Police. More than 480 students have taken these courses, addressing 103 real-world challenges. Dr. Hawks teaches mission-driven entrepreneurship at King's College London, Department of War Studies and at Imperial College London's Institute of Security Science and Technology. She was named the Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards in 2022. She serves on the Board of Directors of BMNT, leading development of BMNT's innovation education programs while also guiding the integration of BMNT's rapidly expanding international presence. She was previously Director of Research at the Section 809 Panel, a U.S. Congressionally mandated commission tasked with streamlining and codifying defense acquisition. She was also an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, as well as King's College London, Department of Defence Studies where she taught strategy, policy and operations in professional military education. Dr. Hawks' doctoral thesis was in military sociology. She received her Ph.D from the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and her MA in Strategic Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. She has multiple peer reviewed publications on her research. Interview Highlights 03:50 BMNT 06:20 Serendipity 10:00 Saying yes to the uncomfortable 11:20 Leadership 15:00 Developing a thick skin 20:00 Lessons of an entrepreneur 22:00 Stakeholder success 25:00 Solving problems at speed and at scale 28:00 The innovation pipeline 29:30 Resistance is rational 34:00 Problem curation 38:00 Dual use investments 43:00 Accelerating change 47:00 AUKUS 52:20 AI   Contact Information   ·         LinkedIn: Ali Hawks on LinkedIn ·         LinkedIn Peter Newell on LinkedIn ·         Website:  The Common Mission Project UK ·         Website: BMNT US ·         Website: BMNT UK   Books & Resources ·         Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less: Robert Sutton, Robert , Huggy Rao ·         Value Proposition Canvas ·         Business Model Canvas ·         Hacking for Defense ·         Hacking for Allies ·         AUKUS DIN ·         Impromptu : Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman ·         Huberman Lab Podcast ·         Allie K. Miller ·         Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification: Gene Kim, Steven Spear ·         The Friction Project - Bob Sutton, Huggy Rao Episode Transcript  Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku My guests for this episode are Pete Newell and Ali Hawks. Pete Newell is the CEO and Co-founder of BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest problems facing the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. Ali Hawks is CEO of BMNT in the UK and also a Co-founder of BMNT in the UK. In addition to this, she is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Common Mission Project, and she Co-founded the Common Mission Project in 2019 and drove its growth as a Startup charity in the UK. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Pete and Ali, I found it very insightful and I'm sure you would as well. Pete, thank you Ali, thank you so much for being with us on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here.  Pete Newell  Thanks so much for the invite.  Ali Hawks  Yeah. Thank you for having us.  Ula Ojiaku Right, this is the second time ever in the history of my podcast that I'm having two people, two guests. The first time was fun, and I know this one would be as well, and informative. I always start with asking my guests to tell us a bit about themselves. So your background, any memorable happenings that shaped you into the person you are today?  Pete Newell  So I'm a retired army officer. I enlisted when I was 18 and was commissioned when I left college in the mid 80s. I spent most of my career as an Infantryman in tactical units. I spent a great bit of time in the Middle East and other war zones. Towards the end of my career, I ended up as the Director of the Army's Rapid Equipment Force, which is essentially the Skunk Works that was stood up at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to accelerate technology to solve problems that were emerging on the battlefield, that weren't part of something else, somewhere else. And in that three-year journey, it probably exposed me to first and foremost, the speed at which new problems are presenting themselves, not just on the battlefield, but in the rest of the world. It exposed me to the speed at which technology is changing, being adopted and then being adapted for other purposes. So it's almost like chasing technology as it changes is a whole new sport, and it exposed me to  the challenges of large bureaucratic organisations and their inability to keep up with the speed of the changes in order to remain competitive, whether it was on the battlefield or in the commercial markets or something like that. Those epiphanies really drove, first, my decision to retire from the military, because I became addicted to solving that problem, and second, drove the impetus to launch BMNT in 2013. And in fact, you are right square in the middle of our 10th anniversary of being a company. So it really is, I think, a big deal because we started with four people on a driveway in Palo Alto, California, now we're a global company with multiple companies and are grateful, but that's the history of how we got started.  Ula Ojiaku  Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, and it's an impressive background and story. Ali, what about you?  Ali Hawks  So, my background, a little bit different than Pete's, by training I was an academic, so my training and my PhD was in military sociology. I was really interested in understanding people's experiences in the armed forces, both in the US and the UK. That is what my PhD was focused around, my thesis, and I went on to be an academic at King's College London here in the UK. I've also been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. But it wasn't until I then took a job with the US DoD, in something called a Congressional Advisory Panel called the Section 809 Panel, which was tasked with overhauling all of defense acquisition, and that's where Pete and I met. I think one of those formative experiences in my career was meeting Pete and going to the non-profit that Pete started and spun out of BMNT, it's called the Common Mission Project with a really big program, Hacking for Defense, and Steve Blank also Co-founded that as you know, and Joe Felter. I went to an educator course for this program in Fort Belvoir as a part of my job to understand, could we take these types of methods and put them into congressional legislation or DoD regulation as a way to change how people think about problems? And when I met Pete, it was the intersection of all of the things that I really love, academia, entrepreneurship, defense and national security. I went up to Pete and pitched him and said, I want to take this back to the UK and launch it. That was the start of what has been thousands of conversations about the value that we can add both in the US and the UK.  I worked in some law firms before I did my Master's and my PhD, but mainly my career has been in academia.  Ula Ojiaku  Wow. Thanks for sharing. And would you say it was serendipity that made your paths to cross and how are you finding the journey so far?  Ali Hawks  I think, yes, I think it's serendipity. I have a really different life journey than Pete. And I think in my career at the time when I met Pete, I hadn't really found what it is, what I felt like my purpose should be, or hadn't really found passion or joy in my work to that day. I found things I loved, I loved academia and I love teaching, but it just still didn't hit all of those things that you kind of get up every day and are like, this is what I'm meant to do. And I had done a lot of work on reflecting of what that would feel like and what that would look like and the elements it had to have. So by the time I met Pete, it was almost as if someone was flashing a huge sign at me saying, don't miss your turn, this is your turn. So I think serendipity, but also really understanding what it is that I wanted to do and the type of people I wanted to work with and the journey so far. I'll hand over to Pete in a second, but it's been nothing short of incredible. Pete has an amazing reputation, but as a business partner and as a leader, he allows people to truly learn, experiment, make mistakes, and he pulls everyone along by building confidence and empowering people that work for him. So in terms of kind of coming from academia and becoming a researcher turned entrepreneur, it's been the most formative experience of my career. Being able to work along Pete is like being able to work alongside that kind of guide or that guru, and you're like, wow, I can't believe I get to talk to this person every week and learn from them and be in business with them. So that's how it's going for me. Pete, how's it going for you?  Pete Newell You know, Steve Blank and I had a long conversation about serendipity when he and I met 2015 and here's my advice in serendipity. It really is if you have an active curiosity and a willingness to say yes to things that you wouldn't normally, and you're not adverse to taking risk, the chances of serendipity smacking like lightning greatly go up. And then I go back to my first trip to Stanford University in 2011. Well, I was still a military officer and saying yes to a number of things that people asked me to do, and just one conversation after another led to a meeting with two guys who were Stanford graduate school instructors who were writing a book. Those two decided to write a chapter in that book about the work I was doing at the Rapid Equipment Force. Now, when Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton decided to write a book and hire a case study writer who spent six months digging into your life, you learn all kinds of things about yourself and about the world, and when that's followed by a chance coffee with Steve Blank, who had no idea who I was, and I had no idea who he was, that 15-minute coffee turned into a four-hour discussion between the two of us. I typically would not have been at the Fort Belvoir thing that Ali was at, and I think our meeting was very brief, but it was, I think, six months later when I found her in the library at Georgetown University at some social event and we both decided that we wanted her to do something, and we wanted to do something in the UK, and we wanted to see something between allied countries come together. There was no strategy or grand business development, there was nothing that drove those conversations. It was simply in the spur of the moment, the curiosity takes over and you start to say I can see where this might work. Now, Ali will be the first to tell you, it has not been easy, but it has been a privilege to work with her and to continue to work between the two governments and the countries to see absolutely brilliant things done. And so I just say, I come back to, it's that curiosity connected with the desire to, the willingness to accept a little bit of risk, but learning how to say yes to things that you're uncomfortable with and digging just a little bit more. That opens up that opportunity so much more.  Ula Ojiaku I could see, it's evident to me the way Ali was talking about working with you, Pete, and your leadership, I'm wondering, could there have been anything about your military background that has influenced your leadership style as a whole? Pete Newell Yeah, everything in my background does. I can tell you, even growing up as a kid that the way my parents raised me influenced me positively, and negatively in some cases. My military background, I have been fortunate to work for a group of fantastic military leaders, I spent time in the Special Operations community, I spent time working for Stan McChrystal, I spent time in the Pentagon working for brilliant people. I also worked for some of the absolute worst bosses in the entire world, and I rarely say this about people, they were just bad human beings, and I will tell you in many cases what I learned watching a leader in a just really horrible environment influenced me more than watching the really brilliant guys out there. If you think about it, it's really hard to pattern yourself after somebody who is brilliant and driven and successful and kind and they do all that, but I'll tell you what, you can look at somebody who is really a bad boss and say, I don't want to be like them, and it happens in an instant, that I do not ever want to be like that person. That teaches you a lot about the environment that you want to create that people are going to work in. I have some hard areas, and Ali will acknowledge some of them, in the way people are treated in the workplace. Also as a graduate of the Special Operations community, I have strong feelings about how high performing people should be allowed to perform, and also expectations of how they work. I think the military left me with a high degree of not just respect, but you want to hire people, there's a certain degree of dedication to their success, whether they stay in your company or whether they leave, or they go someplace else, whether they're challenged or something else. And I'll tell you, if there was something hard about transitioning from the military to the business world is, in the military, you're given people and you're told to make them successful no matter what. In the business world, you tend to just fire people who are unsuccessful and not invest time and energy in them. I have never been able to make that change, and it's a bit of a struggle sometimes, because in the business world, you can't afford to hang on to people who are subpar performers, if you want to run a high-performance organisation. So if there's one of the things that I have learned is I am challenged in letting somebody go because I see it as a personal failure if somebody fails to thrive in my organisation, that has been built and imprinted by my past. I think Ali has a very different opinion, because she comes from such a great different place. Here's the beauty of it, the work with people like Ali and some of the others, we can argue and disagree and fight like cats and dogs sometimes, but we still love each other, and it is still an absolutely amazing environment to work in. That's really what, if you get it right, that's what life's like.  Ula Ojiaku What's your view, Ali?  Ali Hawks So we clearly have different backgrounds, I think that I was a bit of a late bloomer in terms of leadership style. Being in academia, you're not really in a leadership position because you're responsible for yourself, and in a way, it's a really good test bed for being an entrepreneur, because in academia you have to have such thick skin, because you turn in your peer reviewed journal publications, you turn in your papers and people write back and slash, and no one's trying to make you feel good. In fact, they want to help you, but also they're quite competitive. So that was a really good proving ground for being able to develop the thick skin for critical feedback or any feedback and really all of the knocks that come with being an entrepreneur. What I took into starting BMNT here four years ago was, things that I took from Pete and from the U.S. was really allowing people and high performers to work in the way that they feel best. One of the things I hated when I was younger in certain jobs, and working in law firms is punching your time card at 8 am, and you punch out at 5, and an hour for lunch, and it never felt right that that was the way to measure someone's productivity or to really enhance or empower people. And so the way that I approach it is we consider everyone to be an adult and to do their job, and also to be as curious as possible. So on our Standup this morning, with two new team members coming back into BMNT, one of the things that we agreed on is if no one's asking for time off to be creative or to have a day or two days to read a book that will enhance their knowledge or make them a better BMNTer, then we're failing. If no one has asked for that time by the end of this calendar year. So the way that I really approach leadership is how can I empower, but also invest in every single person, because it's not me delivering the everyday work, it's the people in my company, so they're building it alongside of me. I hire smart young people who will give feedback and we action that feedback. So we change things based on what we get from a 23-year-old, so everyone in the company feels really valued. And I think, learning from Pete, is also being really honest and transparent with everyone in the company when your chips are down and you have to say, guys, this is what's going on, and I found it has built such a strong cohesion in the team that we have now, that this year going into it is the most excited I've ever been about running BMNT. So taking a lot of what I learned from Pete and also my own experiences of feeling really caged, actually, in most of my jobs, and being able to understand that people work in very different ways, and if you allow them to work in the ways that are best for them, you really do get the best of everyone.  Ula Ojiaku That's very inspiring and insightful. Now, there was something Pete said earlier on about you, Ali, walking up to him and sharing the vision that you wanted to take back what BMNT is doing to the UK and so what made you go for it, what pushed you towards that? Ali Hawks Again, it was a lot of work on my part of really understanding what I wanted to do, and when I approached Pete that day, I was really excited and exuberant and I said, I want to take this back to the UK and I want to run it. And Pete is, as you get to know him, he's very calm and he's quiet, and he kind of looked at me and he said, you should talk to some people. And I thought, okay, I'll go talk to people. So I went out and I talked to people and I got Pete on the phone a few weeks later and I said, Pete, this is my dream job, this is what I want to do. And Pete said, prove it, do a Business Model Canvas. So I then hung up the phone, I googled Business Model Canvas, I watched YouTube videos on how to complete it. I was still working at the 809 Panel, so I was getting up really early to talk to people back in the UK, make phone calls, pulling on all of my contacts because I've been in defense and national security for gosh, since 2009, and I was canvassing everyone I knew, I filled out the Business Model Canvas, I sent it to Pete, he was going to be in DC about a week later, and he wrote back saying we should meet. So we then met and had an initial conversation around what it could look like, but it really wasn't until as Pete said in that library at Georgetown for a reception that we came together and having had both time to think and think about what I put down in the Business Model Canvas, but also how we got along, I think, and gelled as business partners, we decided, let's do it. So when we said we didn't have a plan, I had an idea of what we could do, and I have unfailing determination to make things work, and so I just knew, and I think we both knew if we tried it, that something would come of it, and if not, we would learn a lot from it. So we went from there and it took a while before we got a plan, to be honest, but we got there. Ula Ojiaku Well, here you are. Ali Hawks Exactly. Pete Newell You know, if there's one thing I have learned as an entrepreneur is that the plan you thought you were going to have, is never the one you actually execute. So the faster you begin to test it, usually by talking to people and doing things, the faster you will get rid of bad ideas. And it's not about finding the good idea, but it's about creating all the ideas you could possibly have and then killing them off quickly so that you understand the core of the value that you think you're going to deliver. Everything after that is the mechanics of how to build a business. I mean, that's not easy stuff, when you're launching a company, more importantly when you're launching one in a country you haven't been in in a while, but getting there is really about getting the thought process moving and getting people to disabuse you of the notion that every idea you have is brilliant. Ula Ojiaku I mean, I agree setting up a business isn't easy. I can't imagine the additional challenge of setting it up in the defense sector, the Department of Defense in the US, Ministry of Defence here in the UK. What sort of things would you say would be the additional? Do you have to go through hurdles to go through approvals, clearances and all that? Ali Hawks From the MOD experience, it's less about clearances and those types of things, it's more about understanding, winding your way through what feels like a maze, to find the right stakeholders that you can bring together at the right time to make a decision. So while there are individuals that hold budgets and can make decisions, there's a constellation of people around them that need to be aligned in concert with that decision. If you went to a business, of course, you'll have to have a couple of people on board, but the time to sale or the cost to sale is relatively straightforward. When you go into the government, you have a group of highly motivated people, highly mission-driven people who experience the pain of their problems every day, and they are trying to fight just as hard as you are in order to change something for the better. So in the first instance, you have great allyship with your customers, because you have a shared mission, and you're both working towards it, which is fantastic. The second is really trying to understand if that person has the budget and they need to sign off on it, how much do they need to care about it, or is it their chief of staff that needs to really care about it? Or is it their engineer? So I would say the difference is the amount of discovery that you do and doing that stakeholder mapping, is fundamental to success, but also knowing that people change jobs in the civil service and the Armed Forces every few years, that is a critical skill as a business working with the government, that stakeholder mapping and that discovery with your customers, customer development never ends. So I think that that is the longest pole in the tent in terms of finding the right people, and sometimes people say that's the person that has authority, you go talk to them and they say, no, I don't have any authority, so it's really trying to wind your way through the maze to align those key stakeholders. Pete Newell I would add to what Ali said, is that it's like climbing into a very complicated Swiss watch and you need to understand not just how things work, but you need to understand why they work the way they do, and how they work with other things, and then you need to understand who's responsible for making them work and who the beneficiary of the work is, and who possibly might want to make them not work. So, Ali's comment on stakeholder development, it's at the heart of everything you do -- you talk about more sociology and anthropology than it is anything, it truly is understanding why things work the way they do and what drives people to behave one way versus another. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to motivate them to behave one way or another, and where you might fit to help them in their daily job or whatever else. But that stakeholder development and understanding who's in charge, who benefits, who doesn't benefit, why something might be counter to something else is so critical in any consulting business, but in particular, if you are trying to get something done inside a government organisation. It, in many cases, it's archaic, but it still operates underneath a very definitive culture that you can map if you've been at it long. Ula Ojiaku So BMNT, you help government organisations to solve hard problems at speed and at scale. Can you expand on this? Pete Newell It's both I think. I go back to my experience, way back in the Rapid Equipping Force and 2010 is first and foremost, there are tens of thousands of problems that prevent the government from doing what it wants to do. The government is challenged, first, in being able to identify those problems; second, in translating those problems into plain English that other people might understand; third, in using that translated thing to find ever bigger groups of people, to then redefine the problem one more time, so that it makes sense for the rest of the world; and fourth, creating the policies and process that will attract people to come to them and work with them to solve those problems fast enough to build a solution before the problem changes so much that the calculus is completely out of whack again. And in all this there's a complicated long answer, but the impedance difference between the speed at which you develop and acknowledge a problem and your ability to get people to work on it, if it's out of sync with the speed at which technology is being adopted and adapted, you will constantly be perfectly solving the wrong problem, and you'll be constantly delivering things that are antiquated before the day they land in somebody's hands, so that's really the speed issue. I go back to what I said about sociology. This is the speed of your ability to get people to come together to work on something, and then the scale is determining, scale how fast, and scale how big. The scale how fast is, I can start to deliver a solution to this, but I know the solution is going to change every 6 months. So I don't need to commit to building tens of thousands of these over a 5-year contract, but I do need to commit to changing what I deliver every 6 months, or this is going to scale to some big end and it goes into a much different system, you have to be ambidextrous about your approach to scale, and unfortunately most procurement laws, both the United States and in the UK are not built to be ambidextrous. They're built to do one thing and one thing very efficiently only. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works anymore. Ula Ojiaku Any thoughts, Ali? Ali Hawks As Pete said, and as a sociologist, the most often thing, and I think Pete said this a long time ago when we first met, is the government doesn't have a tech adoption problem, it has a people problem, and a lot of our work, a lot of our customers will come and say they have a tech problem, and they have a huge degree of urgency, but the things that get in their way are they have no common language, and they have no repeatable and scalable process in which to think about and work on their problems. And the framework that we developed, the innovation pipeline, is that process for them to do it. It's not complicated, it's methodology agnostic, and so it allows you to develop an entire workforce around a common language of innovating, mission acceleration, agile transformation, whatever you want to do, recognising that people are at the heart of it. The Head of Innovation at UC Berkeley and during one of our Lean Innovators Summit, said something that has stuck with me for several years now, ad he said, and it really hit home with our customers, because sometimes when I first started BMNT here, I was such an evangelist that I forgot to listen to the customer. I was just so convinced that they needed what we had, and I think the customer was telling me something else and I would get frustrated, and when I heard this, it was resistance is rational. When we go into a room with a group of people, we usually have a customer who is an evangelist of ours, or an early adopter, a huge supporter, and they have a couple of other people who feel the same way they do about change and innovation and moving rapidly, and then 70 percent of the team don't feel that same way. So approaching it and really empathising with the customers and understanding resistance is rational, why would they want to change? Things for them work, the way that they have always done, it works, and that is a rational response. So being able to then develop a service where you're connecting with them and saying, I understand that, and that's a rational response, and then using tools, like one of my favourite tools, the Value Proposition Canvas, to really understand, what are the jobs to be done, and the pains and the gains, and when you speak in that type of language, there are so many times that I have seen this kind of aha moment of like, oh, so if I did that, then I wouldn't have to do this anymore, or I would be able to do this different thing. And this is not complicated, these are not complicated tools or processes we're talking about, but the common denominators of it are discipline, consistency, and hard work. And I think, coming off what Pete said, when you want to get pace and speed, you have to be consistent and you have to be disciplined, and people have to understand what you're saying in order to get over that resistance is rational piece. Pete Newell I think Ali's spot on in terms of the problem with the problem. Oftentimes is, we can put a problem in a room and 10 people work on it and get 10 different versions of the problem, and so part of the art that's involved in the process is to get a group of people to agree to a common definition of a problem and use the same words, because many times we're inventing new words. It's new technology, new problem, but the first thing we do is get everybody to say the same thing the same way, and then start to talk to other people about it, because part two of that is you learn that your problem is probably not the right problem, it's a symptom of something else, and that whole process of discovery is a very disciplined, I would say it's a scientific methodology applied to how we communicate with people. You have to get out and test your theory by talking to the right people in a big enough diverse crowd to truly understand that whether you're on the right track or the wrong track. That's hard work, it really is hard work, and it's even harder to get what I would say critical feedback from people in the process who will challenge your assumptions and will challenge your test, who will challenge the outcomes of that. That's what our team does such a great job of, working with customers to teach them how to do that, but listening to them and helping them come together. At the same time, we're looking at the quality of the work and because we're a third party, we can look over the shoulder and say I see the test, and I see the outcome, but I don't think your test was adequate, or I don't think you tested this in an environment that was diverse enough, that you may be headed down the wrong path. The customer can still decide to go with what they learn, but in most cases, at least they're getting honest feedback that should allow them to pause and relook something. Ali Hawks I think for this particular reason, this is why BMNT is a leader in this space, is because the kind of jurisdiction around that front end of the pipeline, of are we making sure that we're choosing from enough problems and we're not stuck with a couple of investments that might be bad, so to speak, really validating that problem to decide, is it worth working on, is this even progressible, does anyone care about it, can it technically be done, does the organisation care about it, before spending any money on investment. Now that front end of the pipeline is gradually becoming a stronger muscle, and I'll speak for the UK, is gradually becoming a stronger muscle because of the work that BMNT has done, and both in the US and the UK, there is incredibly strong muscle memory around experimentation and incubation, which is fantastic. There's a lot of structure around that and frameworks and a lot of common language, which is amazing, because when you have that developed, going back to the beginning to refine before you put into the machine, so to speak, that's where what we call curation, really validating that problem, that's a single most determining factor on whether a problem will transition to an adopted solution. Most of government starts in experimentation and incubation, so they don't get the benefit of de-risking investment in a solution, and they don't necessarily get the benefit of all the learning to expedite that into incubation and experimentation. So I think where BMNT comes out and really owns that area is in that front end of the pipeline, and when you do that front end, you would be amazed at how fast the other part of the pipeline goes through discover incubation experimentation, because you've increased confidence and really de-risked investment in the solution. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that Ali, would you say you're applying lean innovation amongst other things to the framework you're referring to, or would that be something else? Pete Newell No, I think that it's all part of the process. We use a variety of tools to get to the data we want, and then it's a matter of doing analysis, and this is why Ali's background as an academic is so critical, because she's keen on analysis, and looking at the data and not skewing the data one way or another, and that's an incredibly important skill in this process. Again, this is really the application of a scientific methodology, and you need to be able to do that, but you need to understand how to get the data. So whether it's Lean or it's Scrum or it's some Google tool or something else. We have become really adaptive in the use of the tools and a mixture of the tools to drive a community of people to create the data we need to make an assessment of whether something's going the right direction or not. And that's the beauty of being involved with the Lean Innovation Educators Forum, the beauty of the time we spend with folks like Alex Osterwalder or with Steve Blank or with the folks from the d.school at Stanford or any of those places that are developing tools. It is understanding how to use and adopt the tool to fit the circumstances, but at the end of the day, it's all about creating the data you need to use the analysis that will drive an insight, that will allow you to make a decision. Too often I find people who are just overly enamoured with the tool and they forget that the tool is just a tool. It's about data, insight, and decisions, and you have to get to a decision at some point. Ula Ojiaku Data, insight, decisions. Amazing. So, if we shift gears a little bit and go into your Strategic Innovation Project, SIP, I understand that one of the shifts you're driving in the DoD and MoD respectively is about their approach to involving private investment in defence technology. Could you share a bit more about that? Pete Newell As part of the innovation pipeline, you have to eventually transition out of the discovery phase and at the end of discovery, you should know that you have the right problem. You have a potential solution and you have a potential pathway that will allow you to deliver that solution in time to actually have an impact on the problem. At that point, you start incubating that solution, and if it's a tech or a product, then you're talking about either helping a company build the right thing, or you're talking about starting a new company, and that new company will have to do the thing. Our work in terms of early-stage tech acceleration is really now focused on what we call dual-use technologies. Those technologies that are required to solve a problem in the military, but also have a digital twin in the commercial world. There has to be a commercial reason for the company being built that's actually going to solve the problem, and so as we looked at that, we found really interesting conversations with investors in the United States and then eventually overseas who were looking for a way to help defense get the technologies it wanted, but have portfolios that don't allow them to just invest in a defense technology, and they were looking for an opportunity to engage one, with like-minded investors, but two, in honest conversations about problems that existed in the military and in the commercial world so they can make better decisions about the deployment of their capital to create the right companies. I think it's probably been five years now we've been working on the hypothesis around this. we started to develop a very strong language around dual-use investments in early-stage tech acceleration and adoption, and we started to build new tools inside government programs, as well as new groups of investors and other folks who wanted to be involved. All that was fine in the United States, but then we found it was a slightly different application outside the United States, particularly in Europe, which is not necessarily the most Startup friendly environment in the world in terms of investment, but at the same time, understanding that the United States has an unequalled appetite for technology to the point where that technology doesn't necessarily exist within the United States, nor do the best opportunities to test that technology exist for the United States, so we had to come up with a way that would allow us to do the same type of investigation with our allies, which turns into this incredible opportunity amongst allied nations and companies and vendors and things like that. And I know that from Ali's standpoint, watching NATO DIANA and other programs start, that it is more challenging, it's a different environment in Europe than it is in the United States. Ali Hawks Picking up there and in terms of the way that we think about investment, and what Pete is talking about is a program we run called Hacking 4 Allies. We currently work with Norway and take dual-use Norwegian Startups into our incubator and accelerator called H4XLabs in the US and we help them enter the US defense market and the commercial market, and one of the things that we're starting to see over here is it is a pathway that doesn't really exist in Europe. So when we think about NATO's DIANA, what DIANA is focused on, which is dual-use and deep tech and what they are overly focused on, and I think is correct, is how do you raise investment in the countries themselves to help booster a whole range of effects around being able to raise money within the country? Ultimately, though, and a lot of what DIANA was doing, in terms of the concept and its focus on dual-use and deep tech, was before the invasion of Ukraine, and so at that time before that, I think in terms of the NATO Innovation Fund and thinking about investment and NATO, it wasn't as comfortable with dual-use and investing in dual-use as the US is, not only is the US comfortable, but you have things like we helped a private capital fund, where people feel a great deal of patriotism, or that it's a part of their service to be able to contribute in that way. That feeling doesn't exist, it exists here, but it manifests itself in a different way, and it doesn't manifest itself as let's invest in dual-use technologies to help our defense and national security. So there's different understandings and cultural feelings towards those things. Now, having had the invasion of Ukraine and now the war in Israel and Gaza and now in Yemen, I think that the change is accelerating, insofar as what are the capabilities that we need to rapidly develop within NATO to be able to feel secure on our borders, and what type of investment does that take? Now, US investment in Europe has dropped about 22 percent in 2023, and so they're a little bit nervous about investing in these companies, and so the strength that being able to change the investment paradigm, which is ultimately, the companies that are going to receive the investment from the NATO Innovation Fund and NATO DIANA, they want to develop in the country, but ultimately all of those companies and their investors want them to get to a bigger market, and that bigger market is the US. So, what we are able to do is to connect real dollars, government dollars and commercial dollars, to those companies. We are one of the only pathways outside of export regimes for the Department of International Trade here in the UK. We are one of the only private pathways that has not only been tested and proved, but that we are able to take more companies year on year, take them to the US and prove that model. Now that's really exciting, especially as we see some of the investment declining, because we're able to identify those companies, we're able to connect them to problems that matter that people are trying to solve, develop the use cases, and then help them on the commercialisation side of things in terms of going into a new market. I think that the way that we think about investment in the US from a BMNT perspective, and the US is a little bit different from Europe and the UK, but the exciting thing is now that we have this proven pathway to enhance and accelerate concepts like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund. Ula Ojiaku So it sounds to me like it's not just about the localised investment into the innovation, it's also about BMNT building pathways, so European Startups, for example, that want an inroad into the US, maybe vice versa. Pete Newell I think the AUKUS DIN, the Defense Investor Network really is the collection of the US Investor Network, the UK and Australia. All three countries had Defense Investor Networks that had been set up over the last several years and primarily focused on, one, allowing investors to engage other investors about topics that are of common interest when it comes to this dual-use paradigm; and two, being able to engage with people in the government about things the investors were concerned about. I'm very clear when I talk about the Defense Investor Network, it is about defense investors, not about the government's problem. I've had to redefine that multiple times, as this is about enabling investors to be more proactive and participate in building the right kinds of companies, not about the government telling investors what they need to do, or the government telling the investors how they need to do it. It really, it was built from the investor perspective, and then we found is that the investors were prolifically honest about their feedback to senior people in the government, which I think has been hard for people in the government to get that kind of feedback, but when an investor with a portfolio of 30 and 40 companies looks at the government and says, I will never do it the way you just described, and here's why. Until you change that quantity, it makes no sense for us to participate, invest in, do, you'd be amazed. Sometimes it is the first time somebody's been able to articulate why something isn't going to happen, and then people nod their heads, well, I'll quit asking for that, or I'll go back and change something to see what it is we can do. So, we went from Hacking 4 Allies, which started out as a BMNT program with the Norwegians, to Hacking 4 Allies with the UK, Australia, Norway. At the same time, we had set up the Defense Investor Network, but as soon as we started the Allies program in the UK, the UK-based investors raised their hands and said, what you're doing in the United States, we want to do here, and then the same thing happened in Australia. When they made the AUKUS announcement, it just made too much sense to be able to look at, if we really want a free flow of technology and problems across the AUKUS governments, then surely we should be building ecosystems of like-minded people who can help drive those conversations. So it was super, super easy to bring the AUKUS Investor Network together, it was just too easy. The part that I think is not so easy, but we need to do work on is we, those investors need to be fed problems that are of an AUKUS nature, and at the same time, the governments need to listen to the investors when they tell them they have problems investing in companies that aren't allowed to participate in exercise or training or contracting or acquisitions in a different country, and if you really want to make AUKUS a real thing, there are a lot of policies that have to change. There's been a lot of progress made, but I think there's a lot more left to do to, to really get the opportunity to happen. Ula Ojiaku And would you say some of the problems would be related to what government officials would call national security, because if it's a dual-use spec, whilst it has its secular or commercial use, in the military, you wouldn't want other people knowing how you're deploying that technology and the ins and outs of it. So could that be one of the issues here? Pete Newell My definition of national security really touches public safety all the way up to military, so it's both. I think if you dig into it, it touches everything from supply chain, to access, to raw materials, to manufacturing, to education and workforce development, and you name it. There's a paradigm shift that has to happen if we're going to build more things, more often rather than long term ships and things like that, that as allied nations, we have to be able to attack all of the underlying foundational problems, and that's my supply chain, raw materials, manufacturing, and workforce that's necessary for the future. No one country is going to get that fixed all by themselves, and I think, to me, that's the absolute brilliance of what AUKUS should be able to focus on. Ali Hawks I agree, and I think that to being able to co-invest as well, the opportunity for investors to come around and understand what are the opportunities to, not only co-invest and coordinate, but to be able to scan their companies and their deal flow to see where their companies can partner and secure greater work and contracts and scale. So I think that it's a really important initiative in terms of being a steward of an extremely important ecosystem, not only being a steward, but being able to build that ecosystem of support and development. How we look at national security in the UK is really no different than what Pete talked about, and when we think about working with companies and the willingness to work with big tech companies or small tech companies or whatever it is, it's not just simply one transaction where, here's the money and here's your software. So obviously the kind of employment and the skills, but what is the ecosystem around that technology that is necessary? Does it require sensors and chips, and what is it that it requires that's going to bring in multiple different industries to support it, and that's really what the agenda here around prosperity is. How do we invest in these types of technologies and their ecosystems around it to have a more prosperous Britain? So you have a wider spread of skills as opposed to just investing in one thing. I think that's where AUKUS brings three very important allies together to be able to do that individually, but then the option to do it across in terms of the broader strategy and the policy around AUKUS, is a once in a lifetime chance that I think has come up. Ula Ojiaku So I think the key thing here is, this is a space to be watched, there's lots of opportunity and the potential of having the sum being greater than the parts is really huge here. One last question on this topic. So you said deep tech, and with Open AI's launch of ChatGPT earlier on last year, the world seems to have woken up to, generative AI. Do you see any influence this trend would have, or is having, in the military space in the Defense Innovation space. Pete Newell I think the world has woken up and is staring into the sun and is blinded. The challenge with AI in general, and I would say that it's not the challenge, AI has a long way to go, and by and large, folks are really focused on the high end of what AI can do, but people have to learn how to use AI and AI has to learn. What we're not doing is using AI to solve the mundane, boring, time wasting problems that are preventing our workforce from doing the high end work that only a human being can do, and I don't care how many billions of dollars we're pouring into building robots and other things, it's all great, but we still have government people managing spreadsheets of data that, they become data janitors, not analysts, and it is particularly bad in the intelligence world. I quote the Chief Information Officer of a large logistics agency who said data is not a problem, we have tons of data, it's just crappy, it's not tagged, it's not usable, we have data going back to the 1950s, we have no means of getting that data tagged so it's useful. Now, if we put time and energy into building AI products that would correctly tag old data, it'd be amazing what we can do. In the cases that we have helped develop tools with our clients, they'll save anywhere from a million to 300 million dollars a year in finding discrepancies in supply chain stuff, or finding other issues. So imagine if we put that kind of work in place for other people, but free people up to do more, better, smarter things, how much more efficient the use of the government's time and money would be, so that that money and that time could be invested in better things. So when I say, yeah, the AI is out there and people's eyes are open, but they're staring into the sun. They're not looking at the ground in front of them and solving the things that they could be solving at the speed they should be doing it, and unfortunately, I think they're creating a gap where legacy systems are being left further and further behind, but those legacy systems, whether it's finance, personnel, supply chain, discipline, things like that, aren't going to be able to make the transition to actually be useful later on. So I would describe it as an impending train wreck. Ula Ojiaku And what would be, in your view, something that could avert this oncoming train wreck. Pete Newell I think a concerted effort, really just to have the government say we're going to use AI to get rid of as much of the legacy brute force work that our populations are doing so that we can free them up to do other things. Part of this is we're then going to take the money we save and channel that money back into investment in those organisations. Right now, the money just goes away, that's great, you did better, therefore, your budget's reduced. There's no incentive to get better that way, but if you look at an organisation and say, you know, if you can save 10 million dollars a year, we'll give you that 10 million dollars to reinvest back into your organisation to do better and something else. Now, you have some incentive to actually make change happen. Ula Ojiaku Any thoughts, Ali? Ali Hawks I think the exciting thing for us, the way that I look at it in terms of government is that that government enablement to be able to use AI, here they are building large language models for the government based on the data that they have, and there's a lot of excitement around it and there should be. It's a pretty exciting thing to do. I think where we're in a really strong position and what I find really exciting is being able to do what we do best, which is help them understand what is the query and how do you validate that query? So what are the basic skills that you need to be able to interact, and then to be able to retain the skills of critical analysis, so when the answer comes back, you do not take that as the end all be all. It is a tool. So within your decision-making process, it's decreasing the amount of time it takes you to gather a certain amount of information, but just as you would if you were doing a book report, you still have to validate the sources and understanding, and you have to apply your own judgment and your own experience to that packet of information, which is what we all do every day, but it's not really thought about that way. So I think that the way that people are looking at it here is it will be able give us the decision and it will be able to kind of do our job for us, and for some tools, yes, and I completely agree that we need to free up all of the mundane work that hoovers up the time of civil servants here, because it's extraordinary how they're bogged down, and it completely disempowers them and it contributes to low retention rates and recruitment rates. But I think also it's developing the muscle to be able to do that critical thinking in order to leverage human intelligence to engage with artificial intelligence. And I think that's where we are uniquely positioned to do that because that is the bulk of our work on the front end of the pipeline, which is how are you going to validate what you know, how are you going to get the problem statement in order to query what you need to query and then having the judgment and the analysis to be able to look at that answer and make a decision, based on your own human intellect. That's where I see it playing here. I completely agree with Pete, we have people looking into the sun being like LLMs and they're going to solve everything, but you sit, let's say a hundred people down in front of an LLM and tell me how many people know what to ask it, or how to use it and integrate it into their everyday workflow. There's a long way to go, but I feel really excited about it because I feel like we have something so incredible to offer them to be able to enhance their engagement with AI. Ula Ojiaku That sounds excellent, thank you. Just to go to the rapid fire questions. So, Ali, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most? Ali Hawks So I don't read a lot of work books, in terms of like how to run a company or anything like that, sorry, Pete, but, and I have a 4-year-old and three stepchildren, so I don't actually read as much as I used to, but I have read over in the last few weeks, the book Impromptu by Reid Hoffman about AI, which is great, and I listen to a lot of podcasts on my commute into London, so the Huberman Lab podcast I listen to a lot, but if you're looking for workplace inspiration, I'm afraid I look at Instagram, listen to podcasts, and then I follow Allie K. Miller, who writes a lot about AI, came out of Amazon, and she is fantastic for breaking things down into really bite sized chunks if you're trying to learn about AI, if you don't come from a technical background. Ula Ojiaku Thanks, Ali, we'll put these in the show notes. And Pete, what about you? Pete Newell I will give you two new books. One of them is a fun one, Wiring the Winning Organization written by Gene Kim and Steven Spear. Steve Spear is a good friend of ours, he's been a great mentor and advisor inside BMNT for a long time, I've known Steve since way back in my early days. The other one is by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton, and it's called The Friction Project, and it's just like you say, it's all about friction in the workplace. I think both of those books tend to lend themselves to how to drive performance in organisations, and I think, knowing all of the authors, that they are phenomenal books, but I think the experience the four of them bring to the dialogue and the discussion of what the future workplace needs to look like and the things we need to solve will all be buried in those books. In terms of podcasts, I'm all over the map, I chase all kinds of things that I don't know. I listen to podcasts about subjects that I'm clueless about that just spark my interest, so I wouldn't venture to pick any one of them except yours, and to make sure that people listen to yours. Ula Ojiaku You're very kind, Pete. Well, because you're on it, they definitely would. Would you both be thinking about writing a book sometime, because I think your story has been fascinating and there are lots of lessons Pete Newell Only if Ali would lead it. So I have picked up and put down multiple proposals to write books around the innovation process within the government and other places, and part of the reason I keep stopping is it keeps changing. I don't think we're done learning yet, and I think the problem writing a book is you're taking a snapshot in time. One of the things that we are very focused on for the military, we talk about doctrine, what is the language of innovation inside the government workplace? It's the thing that we keep picking up, we've helped at least one government organisation write their very first innovation doctrine, the Transportation Security Administration of all places, the very first federal agency to produce a doctrine for innovation that explains what it is, why it is connected to the mission of the organisation, and describes a process by which they'll do it. I think within the Ministry of Defence, Department of Defense, there needs to be a concerted effort to produce a document that connects the outcome of innovation to the mission of the organisation. We call that mission acceleration. We look at innovation as a process, not an end state. The end state is actually mission acceleration. There's probably a really interesting book just to be written about Ali's journey, and I say more Ali's journey than mine because I think as a woman founder of a defence company in the UK, all of the characters in the book are completely unlikely. So somewhere down the road, maybe. Ula Ojiaku Well, I'm on the queue waiting for it, I will definitely buy it. So where can the listeners and viewers find you if, if they want to get in touch? Ali Hawks We're both on LinkedIn, so Pete Newell, Ali Hawks, our emails too are on our various websites, bmnt.com, bmnt.co.uk. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Any final words for the audience? Pete Newell I'll say thank you again for one, having us. Like I said, it's the first opportunity Ali and I have had to be on a podcast together. Any opportunity I get to engage with the folks and have this conversation is a gift. So thank you for giving us the time. Ula Ojiaku My pleasure. Ali Hawks Yes, Ula, thanks very much for having us on together. It's been great. Ula Ojiaku I've enjoyed this conversation and listening to you both. So thank you so much. The pleasure and the honour is mine. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Welcome to the latest episode of "The Pin Tool Podcast," where art meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Al Wayman, from Creek Road Pottery LLC, guiding you through the multifaceted world of pottery and business. In this episode, Alford has a discussion with his virtual assistant, Amelia, an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot. They explore how Key Partnerships are crucial for crafting a successful business model in the creative industry.  Today, we're diving into Key Partnerships, as outlined in the book "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers." Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, learning to compose the right Key Partnerships can transform your art into a thriving business.  The Business Model Canvas:  https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas How To Build a Start-up. By Steve Blank: https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245 Startup Owner's Manual. by Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/1119690684/ My Pottery Journal. By Al Wayman https://creekroadpottery.com/product/my-pottery-journal/ The Cost Analysis Spread sheet: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-cost-analysis-spread-sheet/ The Pottery Dailies: https://creekroadpottery.com/the-pottery-dailies/ The Creek Road Pottery LLC Blog: https://creekroadpottery.com/blog/

The 2024 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition, an intensive 4-week accelerator programme for student entrepreneurs, which is now in its 10th year, has commenced at University College Dublin (UCD) with 14 early-stage ventures and 27 participating students. The participating ventures are focused on a wide range of business ideas ranging from aircraft maintenance to sustainable fashion to digital health, and legal services. A €3k Tech Sustainability Prize sponsored by Terra Solar and a €3k NovaUCD One to Watch Prize are available to the winners of this year's competition. The accelerator programme is run by NovaUCD, the innovation and start-up hub at UCD, as a framework to support undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to work together to develop and grow start-up companies. The aim of the competition is to assist the participating students in refining their start-up ideas through a series of structured workshops, including taught content from industry experts, interactive workshops, regular mentoring and pitching sessions. Tom Flanagan, Director of Enterprise and Commercialisation, NovaUCD said, "Over the next few weeks we will be supporting the participating student entrepreneurs as they begin the process of accelerating the translation of their business ideas and concepts into start-ups. A key objective of this annual competition is to provide students with the skills, the confidence and the opportunity to further develop their ideas and to hopefully in time launch their start-ups on a national and even an international stage." The 4-week programme, which uses the Lean Startup and Business Model Canvas approach, includes a series of structured workshops and interactive workshops delivered by Raomal Perera, Caitlin Hafer and Nirisha Manandhar from Lean Disruptor. Topics such as, customer development; value proposition; working in teams; design thinking; prototyping, environment mapping; financial planning and effective fundraising and pitching, will be covered. This year two new components have been introduced to the programme. The first is focused on supporting the students to think about how they can create AI powered start-ups, what are the tools and opportunities to leverage generative AI, not only in their products or services, but also in their business operations. The second is to provide 'checkpoints' as the students develop their business ideas where they can reflect on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how best to align their emerging start-ups with these goals. At a final workshop, to be held in late-June, the participating ventures will pitch to a judging panel. Based on the evaluation of the presentations two winners will be selected, one will be awarded the €3k Tech Sustainability Prize sponsored by Terra Solar and other will be awarded the €3k NovaUCD One to Watch Prize. Over 70 early-stage ventures and some 170 students have completed the NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition to date. Among the entrepreneurs who previously took part in the competition is Charlie Gleeson, who completed the competition in 2019 with an e-scooter business idea, which became Zipp Mobility. The company which he grew to launch e-scooter and e-bike services in locations across Ireland, the UK and Poland was acquired by ZEUS Scooters in 2023. Charlie is currently General Manager, FreeNow, Ireland. Seventeen (17) postgraduate and ten (10) undergraduate students are participating on this year's programme. Many of the students completed NovaUCD's new entrepreneurship initiative, called Nova Vision, which took place earlier this year. The key goal of Nova Vision is to nurture sustainability and technology, in alignment with the UN's SDGs, and to empower students to contribute to positive global change through entrepreneurial activities.

Welcome to the latest episode of "The Pin Tool Podcast," where art meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Al Wayman, from Creek Road Pottery LLC, guiding you through the multifaceted world of pottery and business. In this episode, Alford has a discussion with his virtual assistant, Amelia, an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot. They explore how understanding your Key Activities is crucial for crafting a successful business model in the creative industry.  Today, we're diving into Key Activities, as outlined in the book "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers." Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, learning to compose the right mix of Key Activities can transform your art into a thriving business.  The Business Model Canvas:  https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas How To Build a Start-up. By Steve Blank: https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245 Startup Owner's Manual. by Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/1119690684/ My Pottery Journal. By Al Wayman https://creekroadpottery.com/product/my-pottery-journal/ The Cost Analysis Spread sheet: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-cost-analysis-spread-sheet/ The Pottery Dailies: https://creekroadpottery.com/the-pottery-dailies/ The Creek Road Pottery LLC Blog: https://creekroadpottery.com/blog/

Bio   David is known for his ability to deliver inspiring and thought-provoking presentations that challenge audiences to think differently about innovation and product development. His keynotes and workshops are engaging and interactive, with a focus on real-world examples and case studies. David's message is relevant for entrepreneurs, executives, and organizations of all sizes and industries, and he illustrates concepts live on stage to leave attendees with concrete tools and techniques they can use to drive innovation and growth in their own business.   Interview Highlights 02:00 Early Startups 02:45 Dealing with uncertainty 04:25 Testing Business Ideas 07:35 Shifting mindsets 11:00 Transformational leadership 13:00 Desirable, viable, feasible 14:50 Sustainability 17:00 AI 22:50 Jobs, pains and gains 26:30 Extracting your assumptions 27:30 Mapping and prioritisation 28:10 Running experiments   Social Media   LinkedIn:  David Bland on LinkedIn Website:  davidjbland.com Company Website: Precoil YouTube: David Bland on YouTube     Books & Resources   ·         Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation (The Strategyzer Series): David J. Bland, Alex Osterwalder ·         Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course: https://precoil.teachable.com/p/assumptions-mapping-fundamentals/ ·         The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Frederic Etiemble ·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos ·         The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses: Eric Ries ·         Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights- 2nd Edition, Steve Portigal ·         The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You, Rob Fitzpatrick ·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur ·         The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win: Steve Blank   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku   Hello everyone. I'm really honoured and pleased to introduce David Bland as my guest for this episode. He is the best-selling author of the book, Testing Business Ideas, and he's also the Founder of Precoil, an organisation that's focused on helping companies to find product market fits using Lean Start-up, Design Thinking and Business Model Innovation. He's not a newcomer to the world of Agile as well. So, David, it's an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you so much for making the time. David Bland   Yeah, thanks for inviting me on, I'm excited to be here. Ula Ojiaku   Right. So, where I usually start with all my guests, because personally, I am interested in the story behind the person - are there any happenings or experiences that have shaped you into who you are today? David Bland   Yeah, I think through childhood, dealing with a lot of uncertainty and then ended up going to school for design. I thought I was going to go a different career path and then at the last moment I was like, I want to really dig into design and I think people were sort of shocked by that, with the people around me, and so I really dove into that and then I came out of school thinking, oh, I might join a startup and retire in my mid 20s, because this is a .com craze, everyone was making all this money. Obviously, that didn't happen, but I learned a lot at the startups and I was introduced to Agile really early on in my career at startups because we had to go really fast and we were in a heavily regulated industry so we couldn't break stuff and we had to have kind of processes and everything. I did that for a while and then I realised, wow, there were some people that could learn from my mistakes, and so we kind of switched coasts. So we were near Washington DC for a while, and then we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I started working with companies there, and I was like, well, let me see if I can just really dig in, help people learn how to apply stuff and coach them through it, and that was around 2010 or 2011 or so, and I've been doing it ever since, and I think why I love it so much is that it kind of helps people deal with uncertainty, gives them a process to deal with uncertainty, and at the same time, I have a hard time with uncertainty. So maybe it's kind of a little bit therapeutic for me to help others deal with uncertainty as well. So yeah, I just love what I do. Ula Ojiaku   And so you mentioned you don't like uncertainty, but helping other people deal with uncertainty helps you, that's interesting. Do you want to expand on that? David Bland   I mean, I very much like my routines and everything, and I feel like I come at it from a process point of view. So when I'm dealing with uncertainties, like, oh, what kind of process can I apply to that? So I feel a little better about things, even though there's a lot of stuff outside my control, at least I can have kind of a process. So I feel as if, when I'm dealing with people, I feel all of this anxiety, they're working on a new idea, they're not sure if it's going to be any good or not, giving them a process to work through it together, I don't really tell them if their idea is going to be good or not because who am I to judge their ideas most of the time? It's more about, well, here's a process you can apply to all that stuff you're working through and maybe you can come up to some sort of investment decision on whether or not you should go forward with that idea. So I feel as if my demeanour and everything comes off as someone that you're like, oh, I can talk to this guy and he's actually going to respect me, and so I feel like my style plus the uncertainty bit fits together really well. So I have a style where I come into orgs and say, you have a lot of uncertainty, here's a process, you're going to be fine, we're going to work through it together and it tends to work out pretty well. Ula Ojiaku   What comes across to me is that you give them tools or a process to help them hopefully come to an evidence-based conclusion without you having to share your opinion, or hopefully they don't have to have personal opinions imposing on whatever conclusion that is.   David Bland   Yeah, it's just a process.   Ula Ojiaku   And so what put you on the path to writing the book Testing Business Ideas, I was one of your students at the masterclass you and Alex Osterwalder ran during the covid lockdown, and you mentioned during that session, I don't know if you remember, that you probably went for a retreat somewhere, or you went on a hike as part of the writing process and that Alex gave you a hard time or something, so can you share your version of the story? David Bland   Oh yeah, I mean it was a joy writing with him. I think one of the difficult times for me writing that book…So first Alex approached me writing it and eventually, I mean initially it was just going to be me and then I mean he needed to be involved and so he played a big role strategically in helping me kind of think about the book writing process because I've never written a book like this and then also had it published and also did the whole four colour landscape style, very visual book. It's not that you just write an outline and then you start putting in words, it's a very different process. So yeah, he pushed me a little bit during that process, I would say, he would challenge some of my ideas and say like, are you explaining this in a way that where people can understand, you know? And so I feel as if it was a very productive process writing the book with him. It took about a year I would say. I think the way it came about was it was pretty much from my coaching, born out of my coaching, because I was helping companies with a lot of uncertainty, early stage ideas and they would say well we're now going to have interviews and we're going to do surveys and we're to build the whole thing. And it's like, well, there's other things you could do that are beyond interviews and surveys. And so he and I were continuously talking about this, and it's like, well, if people are only comfortable doing interviews and surveys they're not going to address all their risk, they're going to address a part of their risk, but not, you know, there's so much more they can do. And so, we started thinking about, well, is there a book that we could put that together and give people a resource guide? So, it's more like a textbook or almost something you would read in a university. My editor, I just spoke to him a couple weeks ago, he's like, this is required reading at Stanford now, and some other places in the university programs. And so it's very much like a textbook, you know, but the reason we wrote it was, you know, to help people find a path forward, to find a way to go and de-risk what they're working on. And so I felt it was very ambitious to put that all into a book, and of course, it has some flaws, but I think for the most part, it does the job, and that's why it's been really successful.   Ula Ojiaku   It is, in my experience, very well laid out. It takes a lot of work to distill these ideas into something that seems simple and easy to follow. So I do concur, it's been very helpful to me as well and the ideas. In your book, in the flap, it says, okay, the number one job as an innovator, entrepreneur, a corporation, is to test your business ideas to reduce the risk of failure. And I think you've alluded it, you've kind of touched on that in explaining how your career has gotten you where you are today. But what, in your experience, do you find leaders and organisations missing the most when it comes to testing ideas? David Bland   I think it's hard to unwind it all, because it goes back to how do you become a leader. And so, at least in Western, in the United States anyway, where I do some of my work, I feel as if it's very egocentric, it's very about what I can do and what I know. So there's a progression of becoming a leader where you grow up in an organisation because you have the answers, or at least you're able to convince people you know the answers, and then you're promoted and keep being promoted. And so when I'm coming in and saying, well, we might not know the answers, or we might need to test our way through and find the answers, it almost goes against that whole kind of almost like worldview you've built up or someone has built up over the years where it's about me. It has to be more than just about you as a person. It's like how do you enable leaders around you and how do you create more leaders around you and all that. And so I think where there's contradiction is this idea of, okay, I'm promoted to where I am because I have the answers, but now I want to enable people to test their way through things and find answers, and you almost need a feedback loop there of somebody that's willing to say, look, do you understand how you've unravelled some of this or how you've undermined things by saying, well, I know this is a good idea, so build it anyway. Or, that's not the test I would have ran, I would have done this other thing. You give people almost the benefit of your opinion, but they take it as marching orders, whether you realise it or not, and then it becomes this core of, why am I running tests at all because my leader is essentially going to tell me what to build. And so I think there's just some unpacking a bit of, well, I searched for the right answer in school and I was rewarded for that, and I went into business and I was rewarded for the right answer, and now we're telling you, there might not be a right answer, there are multiple right answers, and different paths and choices. And I think sometimes leaders have a hard time with that because it almost contradicts everything they've done in the past to be successful. Ula Ojiaku   So, what I'm hearing you say David is that in terms of, even before we get testing the ideas, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's that there needs to be a mindset shift, a paradigm shift of, you know, what leadership is all about, it's no longer going to be about the person who knows the way, who knows all the answers and tells people what to do, but moving from that to saying, hey, I recognise I have limits and I may not have all the answers and I empower you all for us to work together to test our way to find what the right path or direction would be. David Bland   Yeah, it's more about your leadership style and accountability. I think you severely limit what an organisation could do if everyone's relying on you for the answers. It's going to be really tough to scale that because if all answers have to come through you, then how do you scale? But also, it goes from transactional to transformational in a way. So transactional is, it's very much like, well, I want you to do something by this date on time, on budget, and on scope, and then basically hold you accountable to doing that, and then there's a very transactional level of leadership there. It's like, I asked you to do this thing, or told you to do this thing, you did this thing, so therefore I trust you. Where I'm trying get a bit deeper is, you know, well can you say, well, how do I empower a team to go find out what needs to be built, or if there's a real problem there, and then have them give me an account of, oh, we're making progress towards that, or you know what, we shouldn't go forward with this because this isn't worth pursuing, nobody has this problem, et cetera, and respecting their wishes or at least having a conversation about that. And so I think it does require a little bit of leadership. Looking at your style, looking at the words you use, looking at how you lead teams through uncertainty, which could be a little different than ‘I need this thing by this date and keep it under this cost and this scope' It's more about, well, we have an idea, we're not sure there's a market for it, can we go test that and see if there is and if it's viable for us and if we can actually do it? And it's a little different leadership style, and I think if you apply a transactional leadership style to trying to lead people through uncertainty, it just backfires, because it's very much like, run these experiments by this date, it doesn't empower the teams to be able to give an account of how they're addressing the risks. It's sort of a learning moment for leaders to say, oh, this leadership style that's worked really well for me in the past may not actually work really well for me here, it may work against me here in trying to drive out the uncertainty of this thing that we're trying to do. Ula Ojiaku   So if I may just build on your response to the question. What, in your experience, has helped, or could help, a leader who's used to, and has been in the past up until now rewarded for that transactional leadership, to make the switch to a transformational leadership? David Bland   I think asking them what they're worried about. I know people try to project confidence like they have the answers, but they don't, and so being able to be open, even if it's just a one-on-one, to say hey we have this thing where we think it might be a new business line or something that we're working on that's relatively new that we haven't done before, which is a lot of my clients, they're trying to do something that they haven't quite done before. It may not be too far away from what they're good at, but far enough away that they're worried, they're worried that it's not going to work. And so I try to get them and talk about what's keeping you up at night, what is worrying you about this, and then usually in the back of my head I'm saying, okay, what can I map that to? So I love the desirable, viable, feasible framing. I use it a lot from design thinking, user centre design. So if they're worried about the customer or there's not enough, you know, there's not really a job to be done there, I map that back to, okay, he's worried about desirability or she's worried about desirability. And if they're talking about, oh, we don't know if people will pay enough for this, or if we can keep costs low enough, you know, that's like I map it back to viability, right? And then if it's more about, I actually don't know if we're organised well enough as a company to do this and really execute on it and I map it back to feasibility. And then from there, it's more like, well how will we go test that since you're worried about it, rather than just build the whole thing and launch and see what happens. And so I try to kind of, I'd be really careful of the words I'm using and I'm trying to coach them into a moment where it's okay, just let's be open and transparent that it's not just about executing a bunch of things and then we're okay. It's more about, you know, what are we worried about and then how do we go address those worries sooner versus later. And so I try not to come at them with a bunch of canvases and a bunch of mapping tools and a bunch of stuff that would make them feel defensive because one, they probably have not had experience with those, and two, it's like, oh, this consultant's more interested in the tools than helping me, you know. So I try to use words that really kind of get at, what are you worried about and then how can we go test that and then kind of back away into the process from there? Ula Ojiaku   Well, it does seem like you apply quite some psychology to the whole approach, because it's really about meeting people where they're at. And I am, just back to your point about viability, desirability and feasibility. There is a school of knowledge, I mean, you are the expert here, so I'm deferring, but there's a school of knowledge that would add also like the sustainability parts to it. Or do you think it's separate from those attributes when you're looking at ideas? David Bland   Yeah. Well, I work on a lot of sustainable projects at the moment. Well, even over the last several years I've been working on companies trying to be more sustainable. So companies are manufacturing phones, they want their phones to be all recyclable materials, they want fully recyclable phones let's say. So I'm working on very cutting edge sustainability projects, but I still don't introduce it as another circle because I'm trying to keep it very simple. And so I know there are different flavours of it. I know some people add sustainability, some people add adaptability, some people add ethics, usability. Before I know it, it's just, you end up with seven circles and different themes, so I really try to keep it very simple. Even Alex and I talk about adaptability, because that was a theme that didn't quite make it into the book, but he talks about it in The Invincible Company, which is the book he wrote immediately after the one we wrote together. So I have ways of addressing those things, but I don't necessarily want to add a bunch of extra themes, because I feel like it's already challenging people with a bunch of ‘ility' words. I noticed they get confused even with the three. No matter how well I explain it, I'll see things like, things that are about building it, and reframed as desirability, and I'm like no, no, that isn't about the customer. I mean yes, of course we have to build what they need, but building it is more about feasibility. So even with the three I see people get confused so I just try to stick to the three as best I can, but basically we go into sustainability projects, still using those three, with sustainability top of mind. So I don't really call it out as a separate theme but I certainly take it into consideration when we're working on those projects.   Ula Ojiaku   Okay, just keeping it simple. Okay, thanks for that, David. So there are some instances where the people will consider probably are outliers to the known proven principles of design thinking, of product development, customer discovery. And I can't remember, I mean, I would have attributed it to the person, but I was just reading a tweet from someone who is known in the product development world and he was saying that if, he wouldn't have guessed that with the advent of or the popularity of Generative AI, that ChatGPT, according to his books, you know, broke all the rules of products, discovery products, development in the sense that there, and I wasn't aware that they were, Open AI was doing lots of market research to say, hey, what do you want from an AI assistant or Generative AI? But within months of releasing it to the public, they gained millions of users. So what's your thought on this? Would you say it was an outlier or is it that there were some principles working in the background that we are not aware of? David Bland   I imagine there's a lot going on we're not aware of. It reminds me of the older conversations about the iPhone. There was this air of, Steve Jobs had this single brilliant idea about the iPhone and then willed it into being and then everyone, it was wildly successful, right? But I look at, even like the first iPhone as, in a way it was kind of a minimum viable product. I mean, the hardware was pretty solid, but the software, the OS was not. I mean, it didn't have really basic stuff that we would expect that we had on other things like Blackberries at the time. You couldn't copy and paste, there were some things that were missing and people viewed it as a toy and they kind of laughed at it, you know, and then they iterated on it. I would say it was about iPhone three or four, by the time they really started to get market fit with it, and then you see, you know, people you wouldn't expect with iPhones with their iPhone. You're like, wait a second, that person has an iPhone. But that took a while, you know. And I think with Open AI, it's kind of a, we're still in the early stages of a lot of this, I feel, and I'm not really sure how it's going to shake out, but I imagine, you know, they seem to be very iterative about how they're going about it, you know. So I don't know how they went about the creation of it at first, but I feel as if at least now they're taking feedback. They're not just building stuff people are asking for, but they're looking at, well these people are asking for this, but why are they asking for it and what are they trying to achieve and how might we achieve that by releasing something that solves for that. And that's kind of your job, right? It's not just to build what people ask for. It's more about getting to the need behind what they're asking for, and there might be a more elegant way to solve for what they're asking for. But there's also some backlash with AI. So I see some things happening where a lot of my corporate clients have just banned it at the firewall, they don't want their employees even accessing it. They want to keep it within the company walls, so to speak, which is going to be kind of challenging to do, although there are some solutions they're employing to do that. I also see people taking it and, you know, interviewing fake users and saying, I can validate my idea because they asked OpenAI and it said it was a good idea, so I don't have to talk to customers. And it's like, okay, so they're taking some kind of persona from people and kind of building up a thing where you interact with it, and it seems very confident in it. It seems very confident in its statements. Like, that's the thing that I've noticed with OpenAI and a lot of this ChatGPT stuff is that it can be like really confidently wrong, but you find security in that confidence, right? And so I do see people saying, well I don't have to talk to customers, I just typed in ChatGPT and asked them. And I said, this is the kind of customer, what would that customer want? And it can literally generate personas that can generate canvases. It can do a lot that makes you seem like they are good answers. You could also just click regenerate and then it'll come up with really confident, completely different answers. So I think there's still a way where we can use it to augment what we do, I'm still a big believer in that, because I think it's really hard to scale research sometimes, especially if they have a small team, you're in a Startup. I think we can use AI to help scale it in some ways, but I think we just have to be careful about using it as the single source of truth for things because in the end it's still people and we're still, find all the tech problems, still people problems. And so I think we have to be careful of how we use AI in Agile and research and product development in general. Ula Ojiaku   Completely agree, and the thing about being careful, because the AI or the model is still trained at the end of the day by humans who have their blind spots and conscious or unconscious biases. So the output you're going to get is going to be as good as whatever information or data the person or persons who trained the model would have. So what I'm still hearing from you if I may use Steve Blank's words would be still get out of the building and speak to real customers. I mean, that could be a starting point or that could be something you augment with, but the real validation is in the conversation with the people who use or consume your products. David Bland   I think the conversations are still important. I think where it gets misconstrued a bit is that, well people don't know what they want, so we shouldn't talk to them. I think that's an excuse, you should still talk to them. The teams that I work with talk to customers every week quite often, and so we want that constant contact with customers and we want to understand their world, we want to find new insights, we want to find out what they're trying to do and trying to achieve, because sometimes that can unlock completely new ideas and new ways to make money and new ways to help them. I think this idea of, well, we can't talk to customers because we don't have a solution ready or we can't talk to customers because they don't know what they want, I feel as if those aren't really the reasons you should be talking to customers. With discovery, you're trying to figure out the jobs, pains and gains, test value prop with them, continue to understand them better. And if you pay attention to your customers, there's this great Bezos quote, right. If you pay attention to your customers and your competitors are paying attention to you, you're going to be fine because you are, they're getting lagging information, right? You're really deeply connected to your customers, and so I just think we've somehow built this culture over time where we can't bother customers, we can't confuse them, we can't come to them unless we have a polished solution and I think that's becoming less and less relevant as we go to co-creation. We go more to really deeply understanding them. I think we have to be careful of this culture of we can't bother them unless we have a polished solution to put in front of them, I don't think that's where we're headed with modern product management. Ula Ojiaku   And someone might be saying, listening to, whilst I've gone through your masterclass, I've read your book, but someone might say, well, do you mean by jobs, pains and gains with respect to customers? Could you just expand on those, please? David Bland   Yeah, if you look at the, so my co-author Alex Osterwalder, if you go back to the book before Testing Business Ideas, there's a Value Proposition Design book where we have the value prop canvas. If you look at the circle in that book, so the tool kind of has a square and a circle, and we usually start with a circle side, which is a customer profile. And with the profile, you're really trying to think of a role or even a person, you're not trying to do it at the org level, you're trying to think of an actual human being. And in that, we kind of break it down into three sections. One is customer jobs to be done. So you can think about, you know, one of the functional, usually functional jobs that tasks are trying to do, you could also weave in, you know, social jobs, emotional supporting, it can get really complicated, but I try to keep it simple. But one way to find out those jobs is by talking to customers, right? Then next are the pain points. So what are the pain points that customers are experiencing, usually related to the jobs they're trying to do. So if they're trying to do a task, here's all the stuff that's making it really hard to do that task. Some of it's directly related, some of it's tangential, it's there, it's like these impediments that are really, you know, these pains that they're experiencing. And then the third one is gains. So we're looking for what are the gains that can be created if they're able to either do this task really well, or we're able to remove these pains, like what are some things that they would get out of it. And it's not always a one to one to one kind of relationship. Sometimes it's, oh, I want peer recognition, or I want a promotion, or, you know, there are some things that are tangential that are related to gains, so I love that model because when we go and we start doing discovery with customers, we can start to understand, even in Agile right. If we're doing discovery on our stories, you know, we're trying to figure out what are they trying to achieve? And then is this thing we're about to build going to help them achieve that? You know, what are the pains we're experiencing? Can we have characteristics or features that address these big pain points they're experiencing? And then let's just not solely focus on the pains, let's also think about delighters and gains and things we could do that like kind of make them smile and make them have a good day, right? And so what are some things that we could do to help them with that? And so I love that framing because it kind of checks a lot of the boxes of can they do the task, but also, can we move the pains that they're experiencing trying to do it and then can we can we help create these aha moments, these gains for them? Ula Ojiaku   Thank you, and thanks for going into that and the definitions of those terms. Now, let's just look at designing experiments and of course for the listeners or people if you're watching on YouTube, please get the book, Testing Business Ideas, there's a wealth of information there. But at a high level, David, can you share with us what's the process you would advise for one to go through in designing, OK yes, we have an idea, it's going to change the world, but what's the process you would recommend at a high level for testing this out? David Bland   At a high level, it's really three steps. The first is extracting your assumptions. So that's why I like the desirable, viable, feasible framing. If you have other things you want to use, that's fine, but I use desirable, viable, feasible and I extract. So, what's your risk around the market, the customer, their jobs to be done, the value prop, all that. Viability is what's your risk around revenue, cost, can you keep cost low enough, can you make money with this in some way, make it sustained? And then feasibility is much more, can you do it, can you execute it, are there things that prevent you from just executing on it and delivering it? So that step one is just extracting those, because this stuff is usually inside your head, you're worried about it, some of them might be written down, some of them might not be. If you're in a team, it's good to have perspectives, get people that can talk to each theme together and compromise and come together. The second part of the process is mapping and prioritisation. So we want to map and focus on the assumptions that we've extracted that are the most important, where we have the least amount of evidence. So if we're going to focus experimentation, I want to focus on things that make a big difference and not necessarily play in a space that's kind of fun to play in and we can do a bunch of experiments, but it doesn't really pay down our risk. And so I like focusing on what would be called like a leap of faith assumption, which I know Eric Ries uses in Lean Startup, it also goes back to probably like Kierkegaard or something, and then Riskiest Assumption is another way you can frame it, like what are the Riskiest Assumptions, but basically you're trying to say what are the things that are most important, where we have least amount of evidence. So that's step two, prioritisation with mapping. And then step three is running experiments. And so we choose the top right, because we've extracted using the themes, we have desirable, viable, feasible. We can use that to help match experiments that will help us pay down the risk, and so I always look for mismatch things. Like you're not going to pay down your feasibility risk by running customer interviews, that doesn't help you whether or not you can deliver it. So making sure that you're matching your risk, and that's kind of where the book plays in mostly because we have 44 experiments that are all organised by desirable, viable, feasible, and then we have like cost, setup time, runtime, evidence, strength, capabilities. There's like a bunch of kind of information radiators on there to help you choose, and so we basically run experiments to then go and find out, you know, are these things that have to be true, that we don't have a lot of evidence to prove them out, are they true or not? And so we start then using this process to find out and then we come back and update our maps and update our artefacts, but that's kind of the three step process would be extract, map and then test.   Ula Ojiaku   Thank you. Would you say that there is a time when the testing stops? David Bland   I would say it never completely stops, or at least hopefully it doesn't completely stop. Even if you're using discovery and delivery, I find that usually in the beginning there's a lot of discovery and maybe a little bit of delivery or almost no delivery, and then as you de-risk you have kind of like more delivery and then a little bit less discovery. And then maybe if you're in a kind of repeatable mode where you're trying to scale something there's a lot of delivery and a little bit of discovery, but where I get really nervous are teams that kind of have a phase or a switch and they say, okay, we've done all the discovery now we're just going to build and deliver. I feel as if that constant contact with customers, being able to constantly understand them, their needs are going to change over time as you scale, it's going to change things, and so I get really nervous when teams want to just kind of act like it's a phase and we're done with our testing, right, we're done with our discovery. And I feel great organisations are always discovering to an extent. So it's just really finding the balance with your teams and with your orgs, like how much delivery do you have to do? How much discovery do you need to kind of inform that delivery? So ideally it doesn't stop, but the percentage of discovery you're doing in testing will most likely change over time. Ula Ojiaku   So in the world of Agile, Agile with a capital A in terms of the frameworks that originated from software development, the role of the Product Owner/Product Manager is typically associated with ensuring that this sort of continuous exploration and discovery is carried out throughout the product's lifecycle. Do you have any thoughts on this notion or idea? David Bland   I think there's always some level of risk and uncertainty in your backlog and in your roadmaps. So people in charge of product should be helping reduce that uncertainty. Now, it's usually not on their own, they'll pair with a researcher, maybe a designer. They might even be pairing with software developers to take notes during interviews and things like that to socialise how they're paying down the risk. But I think if you look at your backlog, you're kind of looking at middle to bottom and saying, oh, there's a lot of uncertainty here, I'm not really sure if you should even be working on these. So part of that process should be running discovery on it, and so I try to socialise it. So if you're in your Standups, talk about some of the discovery work you're doing, if you're in planning, plan out some of the discovery work you're doing, it's just going to help you build this overall cohesive idea of, well, I'm seeing something come in that I have to work on, but it's not the first time I've seen it, and I kind of understand the why, I understand that we did discovery on it to better understand and inform this thing and shape what I'm about to work on, and so I think it helps create those like touch points with your team. Ula Ojiaku   Thank you for that, David. So let's go on. There is, of course, your really, really helpful book,  personally I have used it and I've taken, I've not done all the experiments there, but definitely some of the experiments I have coached teams or leaders and organisations on how to use that. But apart from Testing Business Ideas, are there other books that you have found yourself recommending to people on this topic? David Bland   Yeah, I think there's some that go deeper, right, on a specific subject. So for example, interviews, that can be a tool book itself, right, and so there's some great books out there. Steve Portigal has some great books on understanding how to conduct interviews. I also like The Mom Test, well I don't like the title of the book, the content is pretty good, which is basically how to really do a customer interview well and not ask like, closed-ended leading bias questions that just get the answers you want so you can just jump to build, you know. So there are some books I keep coming back to as well. And then there's still some older books that, you know, we built on, foundationally as part of Testing Business Ideas, right? So if you look at Business Model Generation from Alex Osterwalder, Value Prop Design, the Testing Business Ideas book fits really well in that framework. And while I reference Business Model Canvas and Value Prop Canvas in Testing Business Ideas, I don't deep dive on it because there's literally two books that dive into that. A lot of the work we've built upon is Steve Blank's work from Four Steps to the Epiphany and I think people think that that book's dated for some reason now, but it's very applicable, especially B2B discovery. And so I constantly with my B2B startups and B2B corporations, I'm constantly referring them back to that book as a model for looking at how you go about this process from customer discovery to customer validation. So yeah, there are some ones I keep coming back to. Some of the newer ones, there are some books on scaling because I don't, I'm usually working up until product market fit, you know, and I don't have a lot of growth experiments in there. So there are some books now starting to come out about scaling, but I think if you're looking at Testing Business Ideas and saying, oh, there's something here and it kind of covers it, but I want to go a lot deeper, then it's finding complimentary books that help you go deeper on a specific thing, because Testing Business Ideas are more like a library and a reference guide and a process of how to go through it. It would have been like two or three times in length if we'd gone really, really deep on everything, so I think 200 pages of experiments was a pretty good quantity there. And so I'm often, I'm referring books that go deeper on a specific thing where people want to learn more.   Ula Ojiaku   Thank you for that. So if the audience, they've listened to what you have to say and they're like, I think I need to speak with David, how can they reach you? David Bland   Yeah, I mean, davidjbland.com is a great place to go, that's me, you can read about me, you can watch videos on me presenting. I have, you know, videos of me presenting at conferences, but also, there's a YouTube channel you can go to where I have some of my webinars that are free to watch as well, and just little coaching videos I make where I'm like, hey, I have a team that's really struggling with this concept and I just kind of make a quick YouTube video helping people out to say this is how I'm addressing this with, you know, with a team. Also Precoil, P-R-E-C-O-I-L, that's my company, and so there's a lot of great content there as well. And then just in general social media, although I have to say I'm pulling back on social media a little bit. So, I would say for the most part LinkedIn is a great place to find me, I'm usually posting memes about customer discovery and videos and things just trying to help people, like make you laugh and educate you, and so LinkedIn, surprisingly, I don't think I'd ever say like, oh, come check me out on LinkedIn, you know, five or ten years ago, but now that's where I spend a lot of my time, and I feel like that's where my customers are and that's where I can help them, so yeah, I end up spending a lot of time on LinkedIn too.   Ula Ojiaku   Yeah, some of your memes there like, I mean, how do I put it, just gets me up in stitches. Yeah, I don't know how you find them or do you commission actors to do some of them, but yeah, it's good. So yeah, so LinkedIn, social media is the main place, and your websites, those would be in the show notes. I also heard you do have a course, an online course. Can you tell us about that? David Bland   Yeah, this summer, I finally found some space to put together my thoughts into an Assumptions Mapping Course. So that is on Teachable. I'm going to be building it out with more courses, but I've just had enough people look at that two by two and read the book and say, I think I know how to facilitate this, but I'm not sure, and so I literally just went like step by step with a with a case study and it has some exercises as well where you can see how to set up the agenda, how to do the pre work for it, who you need in the room for it, how to facilitate it, what traps to look out for because sometimes, you know, you're trying to facilitate this priority sort of exercise and then things go wry. So I talked about some of the things I've learned over the years facilitating it and then what to do a little bit after. So yeah, it's a pretty just like bite-sized hands-on oh, I want to learn this and I want to go try with the team or do it myself. So yeah, I do have a new course that I launched that just walks people step by step like I would be coaching them. Ula Ojiaku OK, and do you mind mentioning out loud the website, is it precoil.teachable.com and they can find your Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course there?   David Bland   Correct. It's on precoil.teachable.com   Ula Ojiaku   OK, and search for Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals by David Bland. Right, so are there any final words of wisdom that you have for the audience, David. David Bland   Try to keen an open mind when you're going through a lot of this work. I feel as if the mindset is so important, you know. So if you're taking this checkbox mentality, you're not going to get the results out of following any of these processes, right. So, I think being able this idea of, oh, I'm opening myself to the idea that there's some assumptions here that may not be true, that I should probably test. It shouldn't be an exercise where you're just checking the box saying, yep, I wrote down my assumption and then, yeah, I ran an experiment that validated that and then move on, you know. It's more about the process of trying to, because your uncertainty and risk kind of move around. So, this idea of mindset, I can't stress enough that try and keep an open mind and then be willing to learn things that maybe you weren't expected to learn, and I think all these great businesses we look at over the years, they started off as something else, or some form of something else, and then they happened upon something that was an aha moment during the process, and I think that's, we have to be careful of rewriting history and saying it was somebody, it was a genius and he had a single brilliant idea, and then just built the thing and made millions. Very rarely does that ever occur. And so I think when you start really unwinding and it's about having an open mind, being willing to learn things that maybe you didn't anticipate, and I think just that mindset is so important. Ula Ojiaku   Thanks. I don't mean to detract from what you've said, but what I'm hearing from you as well is that it's not a linear process. So whilst you might have, in the book and the ideas you've shared, you know, kind of simplifying it, there are steps, but sometimes there might be loops to it too, so having an open mind to know that's something that worked today or something you got a positive result from, might not necessarily work tomorrow, it's, there's always more and it's an iterative journey.   David Bland   It's quite iterative.   Ula Ojiaku   Yeah. Well thank you so much David for this, making the time for this conversation. I really learned a lot and I enjoyed the conversation. Many thanks.   David Bland   Thanks for having me. Ula Ojiaku   My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Send us a Text Message.In this episode of the Grow Clinton Podcast, Andy & Matt sit down with Conor of the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) to learn more about the small business services offered to Grow Clinton members through the Entrefuel program. Conor reveals the tools available to small businesses to help them catapult sales. The SBDC leverages the Business Model Canvas to aid entrepreneurs in identifying their target market and offers a variety of workshops.Thank you to Conor for being a guest on the podcast!Access the SBDC at www.IowaSBDC.org. To learn more about Grow Clinton membership, contact the Grow Clinton office at 563.242.5702 or visit us online at www.GrowClinton.com. Grow Clinton's mission is to promote business growth, build community, and advocate for the sustainable economic success of the Greater Clinton Region.

Welcome to the latest episode of "The Pin Tool Podcast," where art meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Al Wayman, from Creek Road Pottery LLC, guiding you through the multifaceted world of pottery and business. In this episode, Alford has a discussion with his virtual assistant, Amelia, an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot. They explore how understanding your Key Resources is crucial for crafting a successful business model in the creative industry.  Today, we're diving into Key Resources, as outlined in the book "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers." Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, learning to compose the right mix of Key Resources can transform your art into a thriving business.  The Business Model Canvas:  https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas How To Build a Start-up. By Steve Blank: https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245 Startup Owner's Manual. by Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/1119690684/ My Pottery Journal. By Al Wayman https://creekroadpottery.com/product/my-pottery-journal/ The Cost Analysis Spread sheet: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-cost-analysis-spread-sheet/ The Pottery Dailies: https://creekroadpottery.com/the-pottery-dailies/ The Creek Road Pottery LLC Blog: https://creekroadpottery.com/blog/ Creek Road Pottery Pen Pal Program: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-pen-pal-program/ 

Have an idea or tip? Send us a text!Embark on exploring the corporate world's natural progression with tech industry veteran Ben Gibson as he and host Gary Pageau navigate the "EMFL" model together. Gibson sheds light on how companies are born out of innovation and mature through marketing, financial acumen, and sometimes, legal restructuring. Anchored by Gibson's rich experiences at large companies like GE, Eastman Kodak Co., and Logitech, the discussion offers an analytical lens to predict where a business stands and foresees its trajectory; it's a deep dive into the corporate lifeline not to be missed.Are market disruptions the secret ingredient for corporate longevity? Gibson unravels this conundrum as he recounts the phenomenal pivot of Apple and how defying the status quo propelled them to new heights. He discusses the Business Model Canvas to dissect the alignment (or misalignment) of innovative products with market needs, spotlighting the successes and pitfalls of giants like Nike. The conflict between short-sighted stock analyses and visionary long-term planning takes center stage. Gibson shows the contrast between the outcomes of companies like Fujifilm andEnergize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. ShareMe.Chat ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!The Influence Factor by The Influencer Marketing FactoryTop 1% Podcast About Influencer Marketing, Creator Economy, Social Commerce and more.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifyMediaclipMediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!Start for FREEVisual 1stVisual 1st is the premier global conference focused on the photo and video ecosystem. Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the Show.Sign up for the Dead Pixels Society newsletter at http://bit.ly/DeadPixelsSignUp.Contact us at gary@thedeadpixelssociety.comVisit our LinkedIn group, Photo/Digital Imaging Network, and Facebook group, The Dead Pixels Society. Leave a review on Apple and Podchaser. Are you interested in being a guest? Click here for details.Hosted and produced by Gary PageauEdited by Olivia PageauAnnouncer: Erin Manning

Bio Luke Hohmann is Chief Innovation Officer of Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks helps companies create more profitable software-enabled solutions. A serial entrepreneur, Luke founded, bootstrapped, and sold the SaaS B2B collaboration software company Conteneo to Scaled Agile, Inc. Conteneo's Weave platform is now part of SAFe Studio. A SAFe® Fellow, prolific author, and trailblazing innovator, Luke's contributions to the global agile community include contributing to SAFe, five books, Profit Streams™, Innovation Games®, Participatory Budgeting at enterprise scale, and a pattern language for market-driven roadmapping. Luke is also co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, where he partnered with The Kettering Foundation to create Common Ground for Action, the world's first scalable platform for deliberative decision-making. Luke is a former National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion and has an M.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. Luke loves his wife and four kids, his wife's cooking, and long runs in the California sunshine and Santa Cruz mountains.    Interview Highlights 01:30 Organisational Behaviour & Cognitive Psychology 06:10 Serendipity 09:30 Entrepreneurship 16:15 Applied Frameworks 20:00 Sustainability 20:45 Software Profit Streams 23:00 Business Model Canvas 24:00 Value Proposition Canvas 24:45 Setting the Price 28:45 Customer Benefit Analysis 34:00 Participatory Budgeting 36:00 Value Stream Funding 37:30 The Color of Money 42:00 Private v Public Sector 49:00 ROI Analysis 51:00 Innovation Accounting    Connecting   LinkedIn: Luke Hohmann on LinkedIn Company Website: Applied Frameworks    Books & Resources   ·         Software Profit Streams(TM): A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business: Jason Tanner, Luke Hohmann, Federico González ·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur ·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos ·         Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play: Luke Hohmann ·         The ‘Color of Money' Problem: Additional Guidance on Participatory Budgeting - Scaled Agile Framework ·         The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries ·         Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2, Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres ·         The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering: Brooks, Frederick Phillips ·         Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud ·         Ponyboy: A Novel, Eliot Duncan ·         Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, Bonnie Garmus, Miranda Raison, Bonnie Garmus, Pandora Sykes ·         What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, Oprah Winfrey, Bruce D. Perry ·         Training | Applied Frameworks   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.  Ula Ojiaku   So I have with me Luke Hohmann, who is a four time author, three time founder, serial entrepreneur if I say, a SAFe fellow, so that's a Skilled Agile Framework fellow, keynote speaker and an internationally recognised expert in Agile software development. He is also a proud husband and a father of four. So, Luke, I am very honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Thank you for making the time. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me, I'm very happy to be here, and hi everyone who's listening. Ula Ojiaku Yes, I'm sure they're waving back at you as well. I always start my conversations with my guests to find out about them as individuals, you know, so who is Luke? You have a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering, but you also studied Cognitive Psychology and Organisational Behaviour in addition to Data Structures and Artificial Intelligence. AI is now making waves and is kind of at the forefront, which is interesting, you had the foresight to also look into these. So my question is, what took you down this path? Luke Hohmann Sure. I had a humble beginning in the world of technology. I worked for a large company, Electronic Data Systems, and it was founded in the mid 60s by a gentleman named Ross Perot, and it became a very, very large company. So my first job at Electronic Data Systems was working in a data centre, and we know what data centres are, but back then, data centres were different because they were predominantly mainframe-based data centres, and I would crawl underneath the floor, cabling the computers and cabling networking equipment. Now, when we think networking, we're really thinking one of two kinds of networking. We think of wireless networking or we think of some form of internet networking, but back in those days, there were varieties of network protocols, literally the standards that we use now weren't invented yet. So it was mainframe networking protocols and dial ups and other forms of networking protocols. From there, I worked my way from beneath the ground up. I had some great managers who saw someone who was worthy of opportunity and they gave me opportunity and it was great. And then eventually I started working in electronic data systems and there was, the first wave of AI came in the mid 80s and that's when we were doing things like building expert systems, and I managed to create with a colleague of mine, who's emerged as my best friend, a very successful implementation of an expert system, an AI-based expert system at EDS, and that motivated me to finish off my college degree, I didn't have my college degree at the time. So EDS supported me in going to the University of Michigan, where as you said, I picked up my Bachelor's and Master's degree, and my advisor at the time was Elliot Soloway, and he was doing research in how programmers program, what are the knowledge structures, what are the ways in which we think when we're programming, and I picked up that research and built programming environments, along with educational material, trying to understand how programmers program and trying to build educational material to teach programming more effectively. That's important because it ignited a lifelong passion for developing education materials, etc. Now the cognitive psychology part was handled through that vein of work, the organisational behaviour work came as I was a student at Michigan. As many of us are when we're in college, we don't make a lot of money, or at university we're not wealthy and I needed a job and so the School of Organisational Behaviour had published some job postings and they needed programmers to program software for their organisational behaviour research, and I answered those ads and I became friends and did the research for many ground-breaking aspects of organisational behaviour and I programmed, and in the process of programming for the professors who were in the School of Organisational Behaviour they would teach me about organisational behaviour and I learned many things that at the time were not entirely clear to me, but then when I graduated from university and I became a manager and I also became more involved in the Agile movement, I had a very deep foundation that has served me very well in terms of what do we mean when we say culture, or what do we mean when we talk about organisational structures, both in the small and in the large, how do we organise effectively, when should we scale, when should we not scale, etc. So that's a bit about my history that I think in terms of the early days helped inform who I am today. Ula Ojiaku Wow, who would have thought, it just reminds me of the word serendipity, you know, I guess a happy coincidence, quote unquote, and would there be examples of where the cognitive psychology part of it also helped you work-wise? Luke Hohmann Yeah, a way to think about cognitive psychology and the branch that, I mean there's, psychology is a huge branch of study, right? So cognitive psychology tends to relate to how do we solve problems, and it tends to focus on problem solving where n = 1 and what I mean by n is the number of participants, and where n is just me as an individual, how do I solve the problems that I'm facing? How do I engage in de-compositional activities or refinement or sense making? Organisational behaviour deals with n > 1. So it can deal with a team of, a para-bond, two people solving problems. It can deal with a small team, and we know through many, many, many decades of research that optimal team structures are eight people or less. I mean, we've known this for, when I say decades I mean millennia. When you look at military structure and military strategy, we know that people need to be organised into much smaller groups to be effective in problem solving and to move quickly. And then in any organisational structure, there's some notion of a team of teams or team engagement. So cognitive psychology, I think, helps leaders understand individuals and their place within the team. And now we talk about, you know, in the Agile community, we talk about things like, I want T-shaped people, I want people with common skills and their area of expertise and by organising enough of the T's, I can create a whole and complete team. I often say I don't want my database designer designing my user interface and I don't want my user interface designer optimising my back end database queries, they're different skills. They're very educated people, they're very sophisticated, but there's also the natural feeling that you and I have about how do I gain a sense of self, how do I gain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of mastery? Part of gaining a sense of mastery is understanding who you are as a person, what you're good at. In Japanese, they would call that Ikigai, right, what are the intersections of, you know, what do I love, what am I good at, what can I make a living at and what do people need, right? All of these intersections occur on an individual level, and then by understanding that we can create more effective teams. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. I've really learned something key here, the relationship between cognitive psychology and organisational behaviour, so thanks for breaking it down. Now, can we go quickly to your entrepreneurship? So there must be three times you started three times a company and you've been successful in that area. What exactly drives you when it comes to establishing businesses and then knowing when to move on? Luke Hohmann Sure. I think it's a combination of reflecting on my childhood and then looking at how that informs someone when they're older, and then opportunities, like you said, serendipity, I think that's a really powerful word that you introduced and it's a really powerful concept because sometimes the serendipity is associated with just allowing yourself to pursue something that presents itself. But when I was young, my father died and my mum had to raise six kids on her own, so my dad died when I was four, my mum raised six kids on her own. We were not a wealthy family, and she was a school teacher and one of the things that happened was, even though she was a very skilled school teacher, there were budget cuts and it was a unionised structure, and even though she was ranked very highly, she lost her job because she was low on the hiring totem pole in terms of how the union worked. It was very hard and of course, it's always hard to make budget cuts and firing but I remember when I was very young making one of those choices saying, I want to work in a field where we are more oriented towards someone's performance and not oriented on when they were hired, or the colour of their skin, or their gender or other things that to me didn't make sense that people were making decisions against. And while it's not a perfect field for sure, and we've got lots of improvement, engineering in general, and of course software engineering and software development spoke to me because I could meet people who were diverse or more diverse than in other fields and I thought that was really good. In terms of being an entrepreneur, that happened serendipitously. I was at the time, before I became an entrepreneur in my last job, was working for an Israeli security firm, and years and years ago, I used to do software anti-piracy and software security through physical dongles. This was made by a company called Aladdin Knowledge Systems in Israel, and I was the head of Engineering and Product Management for the dongle group and then I moved into a role of Business Development for the company. I had a couple of great bosses, but I also learned how to do international management because I had development teams in Israel, I had development teams in Munich, I had development teams in Portland, Oregon, and in the Bay Area, and this was in the 2000s. This is kind of pre-Agile, pre-Salt Lake City, pre-Agile Manifesto, but we were figuring things out and blending and working together. I thought things were going pretty well and I enjoyed working for the Israelis and what we were doing, but then we had the first Gulf War and my wife and I felt that maybe traveling as I was, we weren't sure what was going to happen in the war, I should choose something different. Unfortunately, by that time, we had been through the dot-bomb crisis in Silicon Valley. So it's about 2002 at the time that this was going on, and there really weren't jobs, it was a very weird time in Silicon Valley. So in late 2002, I sent an email to a bunch of friends and I said, hey, I'm going to be a consultant, who wants to hire me, that was my marketing plan, not very clever, and someone called me and said, hey, I've got a problem and this is the kind of thing that you can fix, come consult with us. And I said, great. So I did that, and that started the cleverly named Luke Hohmann Consulting, but then one thing led to another and consulting led to opportunities and growth and I've never looked back. So I think that there is a myth about people who start companies where sometimes you have a plan and you go execute your plan. Sometimes you find the problem and you're solving a problem. Sometimes the problem is your own problem, as in my case I had two small kids and a mortgage and I needed to provide for my family, and so the best way to do that at the time was to become a consultant. Since then I have engaged in building companies, sometimes some with more planning, some with more business tools and of course as you grow as an entrepreneur you learn skills that they didn't teach you in school, like marketing and pricing and business planning etc. And so that's kind of how I got started, and now I have kind of come full circle. The last company, the second last company I started was Conteneo and we ended up selling that to Scaled Agile, and that's how I joined the Scaled Agile team and that was lovely, moving from a position of being a CEO and being responsible for certain things, to being able to be part of a team again, joining the framework team, working with Dean Leffingwell and other members of the framework team to evolve the SAFe framework, that was really lovely. And then of course you get this entrepreneurial itch and you want to do something else, and so I think it comes and goes and you kind of allow yourself those opportunities. Ula Ojiaku Wow, yours is an inspiring story. And so what are you now, so you've talked about your first two Startups which you sold, what are you doing now? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so where I'm at right now is I am the Chief Innovation Officer for a company, Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks is a boutique consulting firm that's in a transition to a product company. So if this arm represents our product revenue and this arm represents our services revenue, we're expanding our product and eventually we'll become a product company. And so then the question is, well, what is the product that we're working on? Well, if you look at the Agile community, we've spent a lot of time creating and delivering value, and that's really great. We have had, if you look at the Agile community, we've had amazing support from our business counterparts. They've shovelled literally millions and millions of dollars into Agile training and Agile tooling and Agile transformations, and we've seen a lot of benefit from the Agile community. And when I say Agile, I don't mean SAFe or Scrum or some particular flavour of Agile, I just mean Agile in general. There's been hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars shoved into Agile and we've created a lot of value for that investment. We've got fewer bugs in our software because we've got so many teams doing XP driven practices like Test Driven Development, we've got faster response times because we've learned that we can create smaller releases and we've created infrastructure that lets us do deployments automatically, even if you're doing embedded systems, we figured out how to do over the air updates, we've figured out how to create infrastructure where the cars we're driving are now getting software updates. So we've created for our business leaders lots of value, but there's a problem in that value. Our business leaders now need us to create a profit, and creating value and creating a profit are two different things. And so in the pursuit of value, we have allowed our Agile community to avoid and or atrophy on skills that are vital to product management, and I'm a classically trained Product Manager, so I've done market segmentation and market valuation and market sizing, I've done pricing, I've done licensing, I've done acquisitions, I've done compliance. But when you look at the traditional definition of a Product Owner, it's a very small subset of that, especially in certain Agile methods where Product Owners are team centric, they're internal centric. That's okay, I'm not criticising that structure, but what's happened is we've got people who no longer know how to price, how to package, how to license products, and we're seeing companies fail, investor money wasted, too much time trying to figure things out when if we had simply approached the problem with an analysis of not just what am I providing to you in terms of value, but what is that value worth, and how do I structure an exchange where I give you value and you give me money? And that's how businesses survive, and I think what's really interesting about this in terms of Agile is Agile is very intimately tied to sustainability. One of the drivers of the Agile Movement was way back in the 2000s, we were having very unsustainable practices. People would be working 60, 80, death march weeks of grinding out programmers and grinding out people, and part of the Agile Movement was saying, wait a minute, this isn't sustainable, and even the notion of what is a sustainable pace is really vital, but a company cannot sustain itself without a profit, and if we don't actually evolve the Agile community from value streams into profit streams, we can't help our businesses survive. I sometimes ask developers, I say, raise your hand if you're really embracing the idea that your job is to make more money for your company than they pay you, that's called a profit, and if that's not happening, your company's going to fail. Ula Ojiaku They'll be out of a job. Luke Hohmann You'll be out of a job. So if you want to be self-interested about your future, help your company be successful, help them make a profit, and so where I'm at right now is Applied Frameworks has, with my co-author, Jason Tanner, we have published a bold and breakthrough new book called Software Profit Streams, and it's a book that describes how to do pricing and packaging for software enabled solutions. When we say software enabled solution, we mean a solution that has software in it somehow, could be embedded software in your microwave oven, it could be a hosted solution, it could be an API for a payment processor, it could be the software in your car that I talked about earlier. So software enabled solutions are the foundation, the fabric of our modern lives. As Mark Andreessen says software is eating the world, software is going to be in everything, and we need to know how to take the value that we are creating as engineers, as developers, and convert that into pricing and licensing choices that create sustainable profits. Ula Ojiaku Wow. It's as if you read my mind because I was going to ask you about your book, Software Profit Streams, A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business. I also noticed that, you know, there is the Profit Stream Canvas that you and your co-author created. So let's assume I am a Product Manager and I've used this, let's assume I went down the path of using the Business Model Canvas and there is the Customer Value Proposition. So how do they complement? Luke Hohmann How do they all work together? I'm glad you asked that, I think that's a very insightful question and the reason it's so helpful is because, well partly because I'm also friends with Alex Osterwalder, I think he's a dear, he's a wonderful human, he's a dear friend. So let's look at the different elements of the different canvases, if you will, and why we think that this is needed. The Business Model Canvas is kind of how am I structuring my business itself, like what are my partners, my suppliers, my relationships, my channel strategy, my brand strategy with respect to my customer segments, and it includes elements of cost, which we're pretty good at. We're pretty good at knowing our costs and elements of revenue, but the key assumption of revenue, of course, is the selling price and the number of units sold. So, but if you look at the book, Business Model Generation, where the Business Model Canvas comes from, it doesn't actually talk about how to set the price. Is the video game going to be $49? Is it going to be $59, or £49 or £59? Well, there's a lot of thought that goes into that. Then we have the Value Proposition Canvas, which highlights what are the pains the customer is facing? What are the gains that the customer is facing? What are the jobs to be done of the customer? How does my solution relate to the jobs? How does it help solve the pain the customer is feeling? How does it create gain for the customer? But if you read those books, and both of those books are on my shelf because they're fantastic books, it doesn't talk about pricing. So let's say I create a gain for you. Well, how much can I charge you for the gain that I've created? How do I structure that relationship? And how do I know, going back to my Business Model Canvas, that I've got the right market segment, I've got the right investment strategy, I might need to make an investment in the first one or two releases of my software or my product before I start to make a per unit profit because I'm evolving, it's called the J curve and the J curve is how much money am I investing before I well, I have to be able to forecast that, I have to be able to model that, but the key input to that is what is the price, what is the mechanism of packaging that you're using, is it, for example, is it per user in a SAS environment or is it per company in a SAS environment? Is it a meter? Is it like an API transaction using Stripe or a payment processor, Adyen or Stripe or Paypal or any of the others that are out there? Or is it an API call where I'm charging a fraction of a penny for any API call? All of those elements have to be put into an economic model and a forecast has to be created. Now, what's missing about this is that the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas don't give you the insight on how to set the price, they just say there is a price and we're going to use it in our equations. So what we've done is we've said, look, setting the price is itself a complex system, and what I mean by a complex system is that, let's say that I wanted to do an annual license for a new SAS offering, but I offer that in Europe and now my solution is influenced or governed by GDPR compliance, where I have data retention and data privacy laws. So my technical architecture that has to enforce the license, also has to comply with something in terms of the market in which I'm selling. This complex system needs to be organised, and so what canvases do is in all of these cases, they let us take a complex system and put some structure behind the choices that we're making in that complex system so that we can make better choices in terms of system design. I know how I want this to work, I know how I want this to be structured, and therefore I can make system choices so the system is working in a way that benefits the stakeholders. Not just me, right, I'm not the only stakeholder, my customers are in this system, my suppliers are in this system, society itself might be in the system, depending on the system I'm building or the solution I'm building. So the canvases enable us to make system level choices that are hopefully more effective in achieving our goals. And like I said, the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas are fantastic, highly recommended, but they don't cover pricing. So we needed something to cover the actual pricing and packaging and licensing. Ula Ojiaku Well, that's awesome. So it's really more about going, taking a deeper dive into thoughtfully and structurally, if I may use that word, assessing the pricing. Luke Hohmann Yeah, absolutely. Ula Ojiaku Would you say that in doing this there would be some elements of, you know, testing and getting feedback from actual customers to know what price point makes sense? Luke Hohmann Absolutely. There's a number of ways in which customer engagement or customer testing is involved. The very first step that we advocate is a Customer Benefit Analysis, which is what are the actual benefits you're creating and how are your customers experiencing those benefits. Those experiences are both tangible and intangible and that's another one of the challenges that we face in the Agile community. In general, the Agile community spends a little bit more time on tangible or functional value than intangible value. So we, in terms of if I were to look at it in terms of a computer, we used to say speeds and feeds. How fast is the processor? How fast is the network? How much storage is on my disk space? Those are all functional elements. Over time as our computers have become plenty fast or plenty storage wise for most of our personal computing needs, we see elements of design come into play, elements of usability, elements of brand, and we see this in other areas. Cars have improved in quality so much that many of us, the durability of the car is no longer a significant attribute because all cars are pretty durable, they're pretty good, they're pretty well made. So now we look at brand, we look at style, we look at aesthetics, we look at even paying more for a car that aligns with our values in terms of the environment. I want to get an EV, why, because I want to be more environmentally conscious. That's a value driven, that's an intangible factor. And so our first step starts with Customer Benefit Analysis looking at both functional or tangible value and intangible value, and you can't do that, as you can imagine, you can't do that without having customer interaction and awareness with your stakeholders and your customers, and that also feeds throughout the whole pricing process. Eventually, you're going to put your product in a market, and that's a form itself of market research. Did customers buy, and if they didn't buy, why did they not buy? Is it poorly packaged or is it poorly priced? These are all elements that involve customers throughout the process. Ula Ojiaku If I may, I know we've been on the topic of your latest book Software Profit Streams. I'm just wondering, because I can't help but try to connect the dots and I'm wondering if there might be a connection to one of your books, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, something like buy a feature in your book, that kind of came to mind, could there be a way of using that as part of the engagement with customers in setting a pricing strategy? I may be wrong, I'm just asking a question. Luke Hohmann I think you're making a great connection. There's two forms of relationship that Innovation Games and the Innovation Games book have with Software Profit Streams. One is, as you correctly noted, just the basics of market research, where do key people have pains or gains and what it might be worth. That work is also included in Alex Osterwalder's books, Value Proposition Design for example, when I've been doing Value Proposition Design and I'm trying to figure out the customer pains, you can use the Innovation Games Speed Boat. And when I want to figure out the gains, I can use the Innovation Game Product Box. Similarly, when I'm figuring out pricing and licensing, a way, and it's a very astute idea, a way to understand price points of individual features is to do certain kinds of market research. One form of market research you can do is Buy-a-Feature, which gives a gauge of what people are willing or might be willing to pay for a feature. It can be a little tricky because the normal construction of Buy-a-Feature is based on cost. However, your insight is correct, you can extend Buy-a-Feature such that you're testing value as opposed to cost, and seeing what, if you take a feature that costs X, but inflate that cost by Y and a Buy-a-Feature game, if people still buy it, it's a strong signal strength that first they want it, and second it may be a feature that you can, when delivered, would motivate you to raise the price of your offering and create a better profit for your company. Ula Ojiaku Okay, well, thank you. I wasn't sure if I was on the right lines. Luke Hohmann It's a great connection. Ula Ojiaku Thanks again. I mean, it's not original. I'm just piggybacking on your ideas. So with respect to, if we, if you don't mind, let's shift gears a bit because I know that, or I'm aware that whilst you were with Scaled Agile Incorporated, you know, you played a key part in developing some of their courses, like the Product POPM, and I think the Portfolio Management, and there was the concept about Participatory Budgeting. Can we talk about that, please? Luke Hohmann I'd love to talk about that, I mean it's a huge passion of mine, absolutely. So in February of 2018, I started working with the framework team and in December of 2018, we talked about the possibility of what an acquisition might look like and the benefits it would create, which would be many. That closed in May of 2019, and in that timeframe, we were working on SAFe 5.0 and so there were a couple of areas in which I was able to make some contributions. One was in Agile product delivery competency, the other was in lean portfolio management. I had a significant hand in restructuring or adding the POPM, APM, and LPM courses, adding things like solutions by horizons to SAFe, taking the existing content on guardrails, expanding it a little bit, and of course, adding Participatory Budgeting, which is just a huge passion of mine. I've done Participatory Budgeting now for 20 years, I've helped organisations make more than five billions of dollars of investment spending choices at all levels of companies, myself and my colleagues at Applied Frameworks, and it just is a better way to make a shared decision. If you think about one of the examples they use about Participatory Budgeting, is my preferred form of fitness is I'm a runner and so, and my wife is also a fit person. So if she goes and buys a new pair of shoes or trainers and I go and buy a new pair of trainers, we don't care, because it's a small purchase. It's frequently made and it's within the pattern of our normal behaviour. However, if I were to go out and buy a new car without involving her, that feels different, right, it's a significant purchase, it requires budgeting and care, and is this car going to meet our needs? Our kids are older than your kids, so we have different needs and different requirements, and so I would be losing trust in my pair bond with my wife if I made a substantial purchase without her involvement. Well, corporations work the same way, because we're still people. So if I'm funding a value stream, I'm funding the consistent and reliable flow of valuable items, that's what value stream funding is supposed to do. However, if there is a significant investment to be made, even if the value stream can afford it, it should be introduced to the portfolio for no other reason than the social structure of healthy organisations says that we do better when we're talking about these things, that we don't go off on our own and make significant decisions without the input of others. That lowers transparency, that lowers trust. So I am a huge advocate of Participatory Budgeting, I'm very happy that it's included in SAFe as a recommended practice, both for market research and Buy-a-Feature in APM, but also more significantly, if you will, at the portfolio level for making investment decisions. And I'm really excited to share that we've just published an article a few weeks ago about Participatory Budgeting and what's called The Color of Money, and The Color of Money is sometimes when you have constraints on how you can spend money, and an example of a constraint is let's say that a government raised taxes to improve transportation infrastructure. Well, the money that they took in is constrained in a certain way. You can't spend it, for example, on education, and so we have to show how Participatory Budgeting can be adapted to have relationships between items like this item requires this item as a precedent or The Color of Money, constraints of funding items, but I'm a big believer, we just published that article and you can get that at the Scaled Agile website, I'm a big believer in the social power of making these financial decisions and the benefits that accrue to people and organisations when they collaborate in this manner. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for going into that, Luke. So, would there be, in your experience, any type of organisation that's participatory? It's not a leading question, it's just genuine, there are typically outliers and I'm wondering in your experience, and in your opinion, if there would be organisations that it might not work for? Luke Hohmann Surprisingly, no, but I want to add a few qualifications to the effective design of a Participatory Budgeting session. When people hear Participatory Budgeting, there's different ways that you would apply Participatory Budgeting in the public and private sector. So I've done citywide Participatory Budgeting in cities and if you're a citizen of a city and you meet the qualifications for voting within that jurisdiction, in the United States, it's typically that you're 18 years old, in some places you have to be a little older, in some places you might have other qualifications, but if you're qualified to participate as a citizen in democratic processes, then you should be able to participate in Participatory Budgeting sessions that are associated with things like how do we spend taxes or how do we make certain investments. In corporations it's not quite the same way. Just because you work at a company doesn't mean you should be included in portfolio management decisions that affect the entire company. You may not have the background, you may not have the training, you may be what my friends sometimes call a fresher. So I do a lot of work overseas, so freshers, they just may not have the experience to participate. So one thing that we look at in Participatory Budgeting and SAFe is who should be involved in the sessions, and that doesn't mean that every single employee should always be included, because their background, I mean, they may be a technical topic and maybe they don't have the right technical background. So we work a little bit harder in corporations to make sure the right people are there. Now, of course, if we're going to make a mistake, we tend to make the mistake of including more people than excluding, partly because in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, it's a group of people who are making a decision, not a one person, one vote, and that's really profoundly important because in a corporation, just like in a para-bond, your opinion matters to me, I want to know what you're thinking. If I'm looking in, I'll use SAFe terminology, if I'm looking at three epics that could advance our portfolio, and I'm a little unsure about two of those epics, like one of those epics, I'm like, yeah, this is a really good thing, I know a little bit about it, this matters, I'm going to fund this, but the other two I'm not so sure about, well, there's no way I can learn through reading alone what the opinions of other people are, because, again, there's these intangible factors. There's these elements that may not be included in an ROI analysis, it's kind of hard to talk about brand and an ROI analysis - we can, but it's hard, so I want to listen to how other people are talking about things, and through that, I can go, yeah, I can see the value, I didn't see it before, I'm going to join you in funding this. So that's among the ways in which Participatory Budgeting is a little different within the private sector and the public sector and within a company. The only other element that I would add is that Participatory Budgeting gives people the permission to stop funding items that are no longer likely to meet the investment or objectives of the company, or to change minds, and so one of the, again, this is a bit of an overhang in the Agile community, Agile teams are optimised for doing things that are small, things that can fit within a two or three week Sprint. That's great, no criticism there, but our customers and our stakeholders want big things that move the market needle, and the big things that move the market needle don't get done in two or three weeks, in general, and they rarely, like they require multiple teams working multiple weeks to create a really profoundly new important thing. And so what happens though, is that we need to make in a sense funding commitments for these big things, but we also have to have a way to change our mind, and so traditional funding processes, they let us make this big commitment, but they're not good at letting us change our mind, meaning they're not Agile. Participatory Budgeting gives us the best of both worlds. I can sit at the table with you and with our colleagues, we can commit to funding something that's big, but six months later, which is the recommended cadence from SAFe, I can come back to that table and reassess and we can all look at each other, because you know those moments, right, you've had that experience in visiting, because you're like looking around the table and you're like, yeah, this isn't working. And then in traditional funding, we keep funding what's not working because there's no built-in mechanism to easily change it, but in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, you and I can sit at the table and we can look at each other with our colleagues and say, yeah, you know, that initiative just, it's not working, well, let's change our mind, okay, what is the new thing that we can fund? What is the new epic? And that permission is so powerful within a corporation. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, and whilst you were speaking, because again, me trying to connect the dots and thinking, for an organisation that has adopted SAFe or it's trying to scale Agility, because like you mentioned, Agile teams are optimised to iteratively develop or deliver, you know, small chunks over time, usually two to three weeks, but, like you said, there is a longer time horizon spanning months, even years into the future, sometimes for those worthwhile, meaty things to be delivered that moves the strategic needle if I may use that buzzword. So, let's say we at that lean portfolio level, we're looking at epics, right, and Participatory Budgeting, we are looking at initiatives on an epic to epic basis per se, where would the Lean Startup Cycle come in here? So is it that Participatory Budgeting could be a mechanism that is used for assessing, okay, this is the MVP features that have been developed and all that, the leading indicators we've gotten, that's presented to the group, and on that basis, we make that pivot or persevere or stop decision, would that fit in? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so let's, I mean, you're close, but let me make a few turns and then it'll click better. First, let's acknowledge that the SAFe approach to the Lean Startup Cycle is not the Eric Ries approach, there are some differences, but let's separate how I fund something from how I evaluate something. So if I'm going to engage in the SAFe Lean Startup Cycle, part of that engagement is to fund an MVP, which is going to prove or disprove a given hypothesis. So that's an expenditure of money. Now there's, if you think about the expenditure of money, there's minimally two steps in this process - there's spending enough money to conduct the experiments, and if those experiments are true, making another commitment to spend money again, that I want to spend it. The reason this is important is, let's say I had three experiments running in parallel and I'm going to use easy round numbers for a large corporation. Let's say I want to run three experiments in parallel, and each experiment costs me a million pounds. Okay. So now let's say that the commercialisation of each of those is an additional amount of money. So the portfolio team sits around the table and says, we have the money, we're going to fund all three. Okay, great. Well, it's an unlikely circumstance, but let's say all three are successful. Well, this is like a venture capitalist, and I have a talk that I give that relates the funding cycle of a venture capitalist to the funding cycle of an LPM team. While it's unlikely, you could have all three become successful, and this is what I call an oversubscribed portfolio. I've got three great initiatives, but I can still only fund one or two of them, I still have to make the choice. Now, of course, I'm going to look at my economics and let's say out of the three initiatives that were successfully proven through their hypothesis, let's say one of them is just clearly not as economically attractive, for whatever reason. Okay, we get rid of that one, now, I've got two, and if I can only fund one of them, and the ROI, the hard ROI is roughly the same, that's when Participatory Budgeting really shines, because we can have those leaders come back into the room, and they can say, which choice do we want to make now? So the evaluative aspect of the MVP is the leading indicators and the results of the proving or disproving of the hypotheses. We separate that from the funding choices, which is where Participatory Budgeting and LPM kick in. Ula Ojiaku Okay. So you've separated the proving or disproving the hypothesis of the feature, some of the features that will probably make up an epic. And you're saying the funding, the decision to fund the epic in the first place is a different conversation. And you've likened it to Venture Capital funding rounds. Where do they connect? Because if they're separate, what's the connecting thread between the two? Luke Hohmann The connected thread is the portfolio process, right? The actual process is the mechanism where we're connecting these things. Ula Ojiaku OK, no, thanks for the portfolio process. But there is something you mentioned, ROI - Return On Investment. And sometimes when you're developing new products, you don't know, you have assumptions. And any ROI, sorry to put it this way, but you're really plucking figures from the air, you know, you're modelling, but there is no certainty because you could hit the mark or you could go way off the mark. So where does that innovation accounting coming into place, especially if it's a product that's yet to make contact with, you know, real life users, the customers. Luke Hohmann Well, let's go back to something you said earlier, and what you talked earlier about was the relationship that you have in market researching customer interaction. In making a forecast, let's go ahead and look at the notion of building a new product within a company, and this is again where the Agile community sometimes doesn't want to look at numbers or quote, unquote get dirty, but we have to, because if I'm going to look at building a new idea, or taking a new idea into a product, I have to have a forecast of its viability. Is it economically viable? Is it a good choice? So innovation accounting is a way to look at certain data, but before, I'm going to steal a page, a quote, from one of my friends, Jeff Patton. The most expensive way to figure this out is to actually build the product. So what can I do that's less expensive than building the product itself? I can still do market research, but maybe I wouldn't do an innovation game, maybe I'd do a formal survey and I use a price point testing mechanism like Van Westendorp Price Point Analysis, which is a series of questions that you ask to triangulate on acceptable price ranges. I can do competitive benchmarking for similar products and services. What are people offering right now in the market? Now that again, if the product is completely novel, doing competitive benchmarking can be really hard. Right now, there's so many people doing streaming that we look at the competitive market, but when Netflix first offered streaming and it was the first one, their best approach was what we call reference pricing, which is, I have a reference price for how much I pay for my DVDs that I'm getting in the mail, I'm going to base my streaming service kind of on the reference pricing of entertainment, although that's not entirely clear that that was the best way to go, because you could also base the reference price on what you're paying for a movie ticket and how many, but then you look at consumption, right, because movie tickets are expensive, so I only go to a movie maybe once every other month, whereas streaming is cheap and so I can change my demand curve by lowering my price. But this is why it's such a hard science is because we have this notion of these swirling factors. Getting specifically back to your question about the price point, I do have to do some market research before I go into the market to get some forecasting and some confidence, and research gives me more confidence, and of course, once I'm in the market, I'll know how effective my research matched the market reality. Maybe my research was misleading, and of course, there's some skill in designing research, as you know, to get answers that have high quality signal strength. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for clarifying. That makes perfect sense to me. Luke Hohmann It's kind of like a forecast saying, like there's a group of Agile people who will say, like, you shouldn't make forecasts. Well, I don't understand that because that's like saying, and people will say, well, I can't predict the future. Well, okay, I can't predict when I'm going to retire, but I'm planning to retire. I don't know the date of my exact retirement, but my wife and I are planning our retirement, and we're saving, we're making certain investment choices for our future, because we expect to have a future together. Now our kids are older than yours. My kids are now in university, and so we're closer to retirement. So what I dislike about the Agile community is people will sometimes say, well, I don't know the certainty of the event, therefore, I can't plan for it. But that's really daft, because there are many places in like, you may not for the listeners, her daughter is a little younger than my kids, but they will be going to university one day, and depending on where they go, that's a financial choice. So you could say, well, I don't know when she's going to university, and I can't predict what university she's going to go to, therefore I'm not going to save any money. Really? That doesn't make no sense. So I really get very upset when you have people in the agile community will say things like road mapping or forecasting is not Agile. It's entirely Agile. How you treat it is Agile or not Agile. Like when my child comes up to me and says, hey, you know about that going to university thing, I was thinking of taking a gap year. Okay, wait a minute, that's a change. That doesn't mean no, it means you're laughing, right? But that's a change. And so we respond to change, but we still have a plan. Ula Ojiaku It makes sense. So the reason, and I completely resonate with everything you said, the reason I raised that ROI and it not being known is that in some situations, people might be tempted to use it to game the budget allocation decision making process. That's why I said you would pluck the ROI. Luke Hohmann Okay, let's talk about that. We actually address this in our recent paper, but I'll give you my personal experience. You are vastly more likely to get bad behaviour on ROI analysis when you do not do Participatory Budgeting, because there's no social construct to prevent bad behaviour. If I'm sitting down at a table and that's virtual or physical, it doesn't matter, but let's take a perfect optimum size for a Participatory Budgeting group. Six people, let's say I'm a Director or a Senior Director in a company, and I'm sitting at a table and there's another Senior Director who's a peer, maybe there's a VP, maybe there's a person from engineering, maybe there's a person from sales and we've got this mix of people and I'm sitting at that table. I am not incented to come in with an inflated ROI because those people are really intelligent and given enough time, they're not going to support my initiative because I'm fibbing, I'm lying. And I have a phrase for this, it's when ROI becomes RO-lie that it's dangerous. And so when I'm sitting at that table, what we find consistently, and one of the clients that we did a fair amount of Participatory Budgeting for years ago with Cisco, what we found was the leaders at Cisco were creating tighter, more believable, and more defensible economic projections, precisely because they knew that they were going to be sitting with their peers, and it didn't matter. It can go both ways. Sometimes people will overestimate the ROI or they underestimate the cost. Same outcome, right? I'm going to overestimate the benefit, and people would be like, yeah, I don't think you can build that product with three teams. You're going to need five or six teams and people go, oh, I can get it done with, you know, 20 people. Yeah, I don't think so, because two years ago, we built this product. It's very similar, and, you know, we thought we could get it done with 20 people and we couldn't. We really needed, you know, a bigger group. So you see the social construct creating a more believable set of results because people come to the Participatory Budgeting session knowing that their peers are in the room. And of course, we think we're smart, so our peers are as smart as we are, we're all smart people, and therefore, the social construct of Participatory Budgeting quite literally creates a better input, which creates a better output. Ula Ojiaku That makes sense, definitely. Thanks for sharing that. I've found that very, very insightful and something I can easily apply. The reasoning behind it, the social pressure, quote unquote, knowing that you're not just going to put the paper forward but you'd have to defend it in a credible, believable way make sense. So just to wrap up now, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most, and why? Luke Hohmann It's so funny, I get yelled at by my wife for how many books I buy. She'll go like “It's Amazon again. Another book. You know, there's this thing called the library.” Ula Ojiaku You should do Participatory Budgeting for your books then sounds like, sorry. Luke Hohmann No, no, I don't, I'd lose. Gosh, I love so many books. So there's a few books that I consider to be my go-to references and my go-to classics, but I also recommend that people re-read books and sometimes I recommend re-reading books is because you're a different person, and as you age and as you grow and you see things differently and in fact, I'm right now re-reading and of course it goes faster, but I'm re-reading the original Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck, a fantastic book. I just finished reading a few new books, but let me let me give you a couple of classics that I think everyone in our field should read and why they should read them. I think everyone should read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks because he really covers some very profound truths that haven't changed, things like Brooks Law, which is adding programmers to a late project, makes it later. He talks about the structure of teams and how to scale before scaling was big and important and cool. He talks about communication and conceptual integrity and the role of the architect. The other book that I'm going to give, which I hope is different than any book that anyone has ever given you, because it's one of my absolute favourite books and I give them away, is a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Comics or graphic novels are an important medium for communication, and when we talk about storytelling and we talk about how to frame information and how to present information, understanding comics is profoundly insightful in terms of how to present, share, show information. A lot of times I think we make things harder than they should be. So when I'm working with executives and some of the clients that I work with personally, when we talk about our epics, we actually will tell stories about the hero's journey and we actually hire comic book artists to help the executives tell their story in a comic form or in a graphic novel form. So I absolutely love understanding comics. I think that that's really a profound book. Of course you mentioned Alex Osterwalder's books, Business Model Generation, Business Model Canvas. Those are fantastic books for Product Managers. I also, just looking at my own bookshelves, of course, Innovation Games for PMs, of course Software Profit Streams because we have to figure out how to create sustainability, but in reality there's so many books that we love and that we share and that we grow together when we're sharing books and I'll add one thing. Please don't only limit your books to technical books. We're humans too. I recently, this week and what I mean recent I mean literally this weekend I was visiting one of my kids in Vermont all the way across the country, and so on the plane ride I finished two books, one was a very profound and deeply written book called Ponyboy. And then another one was a very famous book on a woman protagonist who's successful in the 60s, Lessons in Chemistry, which is a new book that's out, and it was a super fun light read, some interesting lessons of course, because there's always lessons in books, and now if it's okay if I'm not overstepping my boundaries, what would be a book that you'd like me to read? I love to add books to my list. Ula Ojiaku Oh my gosh, I didn't know. You are the first guest ever who's twisted this on me, but I tend to read multiple books at a time. Luke Hohmann Only two. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, so, and I kind of switch, maybe put some on my bedside and you know there's some on my Kindle and in the car, just depending. So I'm reading multiple books at a time, but based on what you've said the one that comes to mind is the new book by Oprah Winfrey and it's titled What Happened to You? Understanding Trauma, because like you said, it's not just about reading technical books and we're human beings and we find out that people behave probably sometimes in ways that are different to us, and it's not about saying what's wrong with you, because there is a story that we might not have been privy to, you know, in terms of their childhood, how they grew up, which affected their worldview and how they are acting, so things don't just suddenly happen. And the question that we have been asked and we sometimes ask of people, and for me, I'm reading it from a parent's perspective because I understand that even more so that my actions, my choices, they play a huge, you know, part in shaping my children. So it's not saying what's wrong with you? You say, you know, what happened to you? And it traces back to, based on research, because she wrote it with a renowned psychologist, I don't know his field but a renowned psychologist, so neuroscience-based psychological research on human beings, attachment theory and all that, just showing how early childhood experiences, even as early as maybe a few months old, tend to affect people well into adulthood. So that would be my recommendation. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much. That's a gift. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. You're the first person to ask me. So, my pleasure. So, before we go to the final words, where can the audience find you, because you have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience, and I am sure that people would want to get in touch with you, so how can they do this please? Luke Hohmann Yeah, well, they can get me on LinkedIn and they can find me at Applied Frameworks. I tell you, I teach classes that are known to be very profound because we always reserve, myself and the instructors at Applied Frameworks, we have very strong commitments to reserving class time for what we call the parking lot or the ask me anything question, which are many times after I've covered the core material in the class, having the opportunity to really frame how to apply something is really important. So I would definitely encourage people to take one of my classes because you'll not get the material, you'll get the reasons behind the material, which means you can apply it, but you'll also be able to ask us questions and our commitment as a company is you can ask us anything and if we don't know the answer, we'll help you find it. We'll help you find the expert or the person that you need talk to, to help you out and be successful. And then, and I think in terms of final words, I will simply ask people to remember that we get to work in the most amazing field building things for other people and it's joyful work, and we, one of my phrases is you're not doing Agile, if you're not having fun at work, there's something really wrong, there's something missing, yeah we need to retrospect and we need to improve and we need to reflect and all those important things, absolutely, but we should allow ourselves to experience the joy of serving others and being of service and building things that matter. Ula Ojiaku I love the concept of joyful Agile and getting joy in building things that matter, serving people and may I add also working together with amazing people, and for me it's been a joyful conversation with you, Luke, I really appreciate you making the time, I am definitely richer and more enlightened as a result of this conversation, so thank you so much once more. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me here, thank you everyone for listening with us. Ula Ojiaku  My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

NovaUCD has announced SusBioME, an emerging Greentech start-up, as the overall winner of the 2024 UCD VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme. SusBioME is developing technology for use in the anaerobic digestion process to increase renewable gas yields from biomass. The annual VentureLaunch Programme, which is run by NovaUCD, aims to support the creation and launch of sustainable and profitable new start-ups emerging from University College Dublin (UCD). Renewable gas from anaerobic digestion is key for energy security and sustainability. In the anaerobic digestion process, organic feedstocks, including wastes, are digested and turned into biogas or biomethane, which can be used exactly like natural gas. However, a major bottleneck limiting renewable gas production is the low digestibility of feedstock used in the anaerobic digestion process, which leads to unrealised gas yields and low operational efficiency. To address this problem SusBioME, a start-up emerging from the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, is developing modular, plug-in disruptive electro-processing technologies to make feedstocks more biodigestible. As a platform technology, it can be applied to a wide range of feedstocks and bioprocesses. By the direct applications of electric fields, the SusBioME technology physically disrupts feedstocks, which rapidly and very efficiently make them more biodigestible leading to gas yield improvements of up to 30% for renewable gas producers along with reduced operational costs and increased revenues. The members of the SusBioME team are Dr Ajay Menon, who completed the VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme, Professor James Lyng, Norman Maloney and Bernie Fitzpatrick. Dr Ajay Menon, UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and a promoter of SusBioME said, "We are delighted to have been named the overall winner of the 2024 UCD VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme. Everyone knows why renewable energy is important, but few know how much of it is sourced from biomass. Last year, 59% of the EU's renewable energy came from biomass-based bioenergy, more than wind, solar and hydro combined. Renewable gas, made using anaerobic digestion, is the most promising and important kind of bioenergy and is a huge and growing industry. However, a major bottleneck in the process is that the feedstock cannot be digested very well leading to unrealised gas yields. The SusBioME technology which we have successfully trialled addresses this issue and results in gas yield improvements of up to 30%, an important development for the sector." He added, "Currently we are half-way through our Enterprise Ireland Commercialistion Fund project, and we already have three trial partners secured for pilot demonstrations. In 2025 we intend to spin-out of UCD, raise some €500k in pre-seed funding and commercially launch SusBioME." He concluded, "I would like to acknowledge the excellent support provided by the NovaUCD team, the VentureLaunch programme facilitators, and the other VentureLaunch participants, especially for their invaluable feedback and advice throughout the programme. I would like to acknowledge and thank Enterprise Ireland for their continuing support through the Commercialisation Fund and also BiOrbic, Bioeconomy SFI Research Centre and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine." The main objective of the UCD VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme is to equip participants with the knowledge, skills and understanding that will be required to work as part of a team leading a new commercial venture. On completion of the programme the expectation is that participating new ventures will have developed a commercially viable business plan. The programme consisted of eight (8) workshops delivered over a three-month period from February to April at NovaUCD. The Business Model Canvas approach to start-up development forms the basis of the programme with each session consisting of a mix of taught content and interactive workshops delivered by ...

Ever wonder how to turn your entrepreneurial dreams into reality? Tune into our latest episode of Passive Income Pilots as we soar into the world of angel investing and marketplace innovation with Nick Huzar, the CEO and founder of OfferUp! Discover how Nick's room full of unwanted items sparked the vision for a multi-billion-dollar company that revolutionized the way we sell online. Whether you're a passive income beginner or a seasoned investor, this episode is packed with insights on startup growth, the spirit of innovation, and practical tips for investing. Join us as Nick shares his journey through successes, setbacks, and the continuous quest for environmental sustainability through circularity. Gear up for a flight that could change your financial trajectory forever! #OfferUp #AngelInvesting #PassiveIncome #StartupSuccess #EnvironmentalSustainabilityTimestamped Show Notes:(00:00) - Introduction to the episode with Tait Duryea and Ryan Gibson(02:15) - Meet Nick Huzar, the co-founder of OfferUp(04:30) - The conception of OfferUp and Nick's vision for a better marketplace(08:00) - Nick's entrepreneurial mindset and why he chooses innovation over a 9-5(12:25) - The early challenges and bootstrap days of OfferUp(16:45) - The transition from angel investing to VC funding explained(21:10) - How to identify and support potentially groundbreaking startups(26:00) - The intersection of environmental sustainability and technology(30:35) - The anatomy of angel, VC, and private equity investing(34:50) - Real-world stories of investment hits and misses(39:15) - Nick's fresh take on tackling environmental challenges(43:00) - How listeners can get involved in alternative investments(48:00) - Closing remarks and takeaways from Nick's experiences(53:30) - Outro and invitation to connect with Passive Income PilotsRemember to subscribe for more insights at PassiveIncomePilots.com!Join our growing community on FacebookCheck us out on Instagram @PassiveIncomePilotsFollow us on X @IncomePilotsGet our updates on LinkedInBe sure to follow Nick @nhuzar on Instagram or on X @nickhuzar for more insights!Have questions or want to discuss this episode? Contact us at ask@passiveincomepilots.com or record your question to be featured on the show HERE! Fly high with us next time on Passive Income Pilots!

Kamran Kardan ORCID: 0000-0003-4324-7620 ⁠Kamran Kardan⁠ is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Knowledge E. He founded Knowledge E in 2012, to provide unique, professional, and high-quality services to theinformation professionals in the Middle Eastern region and beyond. He is also the Co-founder and Managing Director at Zendy, an organization that is focused on making academic research affordable and accessible around the world. Kamran has 20 years of experience working in the publishing industry on both the publisher and agency front. Working closely with some of the top consortia, libraries, ministries, hospitals and corporations within research and education in the region, he has experienced the birth and growth of many digital libraries. Driven by his interest in learning societies, he has initiated and participated in the completion of various special development projects. Kamran holds a BSc in Engineering, an MSc in Marketing with a thesis on ‘Open Access publishing business models' as well as an MBA from the University of Manchester with a dissertation on ‘The application of Business Model Canvas in university research offices'. Kamran plays a major active role in the Knowledge E Foundation, a community interest corporation focusing on supporting education and research-based projects across the globe, with a focus on developing nations. Find more podcast episodes here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://access2perspectives.pubpub.org/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Dr Jo Havemann⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ORCID iD ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠0000-0002-6157-1494 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Editing: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ebuka Ezeike⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Alex Lustig⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, produced by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Kitty Kat ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ License:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)   ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ At Access 2 Perspectives, we guide you in your complete research workflow toward state-of-the-art research practices and in full compliance with funding and publishing requirements. Leverage your research projects to higher efficiency and increased collaboration opportunities while fostering your explorative spirit and joy. Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://access2perspectives.pubpub.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/access2perspectives/message

At Rev: Ithaca Startup Works, part of the Center for Regional Economic Advancement at Cornell (CREA), Ken Rother helps entrepreneurs launch physical product startups through his role as director and hardware programs lead. He joins host Chris Wofford in this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast from eCornell to offer guidance on bringing a physical product to market – from developing a prototype to securing investors.  Listen and learn how to:Understand whether you are solving a real customer problemUse the Business Model CanvasFind maker spaces and incubatorsPlan and build “looks like” and “works like” prototypesSeparate the processes of prototyping and manufacturingIdentify the best partners for product reproducibilityStrategize for product distribution and marketingSeek funding and de-risk your product for investorsRev: Ithaca Startup Works supports every kind of startup, including those focused on hardware and physical products. Explore Rev's programs and services to help you launch and grow your product startup, including this summer's Prototyping Hardware Accelerator.Bookmark these resources on entrepreneurship, product development and product management curated by Ken Rother and learn more in his Product Development certificate program from eCornell.CREA is a division of Research & Innovation at Cornell. Follow eCornell on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X.

What makes a company invincible? How do you know if a company takes innovation seriously? Alexander Osterwalder has the answers.  Alex is an entrepreneur, leading author, and in-demand speaker, and one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts. Ranked no. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, his work has changed how established companies do business and how new ventures get started. His books include the international bestsellers «Business Model Generation», «Value Proposition Design», and «The Invincible Company.» Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas – practical tools that are trusted by millions.  He explains what makes a company invincible, what companies get right and wrong about innovation, how you can create a value proposition for your business that customers love.  We also discuss how storytelling helps your businesses suspend disbelief in the unfamiliar.  Enjoy this episode with one of the world's foremost strategy and innovation thinkers! Would you like to receive weekly tips from me on how you can join the top 1% of business communicators? Try the Speak Like a CEO newsletter. It is highly actionable and provides a ton of insights that you can immediately apply to your own career or business.  https://www.eoipsocommunications.com/newsletter/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/likeaceo/message

Welcome to the latest episode of "The Pin Tool Podcast," where art meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Al Wayman, from Creek Road Pottery LLC, guiding you through the multifaceted world of pottery and business. Today, we're diving into the concept of Channels, as outlined in the book "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers." This episode will explore how understanding your Channels are crucial for crafting a successful business model in the creative industry. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, learning to compose the right mix of channels can transform your art into a thriving business.  The Business Model Canvas:  https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas How To Build a Start-up. By Steve Blank: https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245 Startup Owner's Manual. by Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/1119690684/ My Pottery Journal. By Al Wayman https://creekroadpottery.com/product/my-pottery-journal/ The Cost Analysis Spread sheet: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-cost-analysis-spread-sheet/ The Pottery Dailies: https://creekroadpottery.com/the-pottery-dailies/ The Creek Road Pottery LLC Blog: https://creekroadpottery.com/blog/ Creek Road Pottery Pen Pal Program: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-pen-pal-program/ The Cry Pots: https://www.facebook.com/alford.wayman/videos/441678594958937 The Good Pots: https://www.facebook.com/alford.wayman/videos/7259756667440015

Welcome to the latest episode of "The Pin Tool Podcast," where art meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Al Wayman, from Creek Road Pottery LLC, guiding you through the multifaceted world of pottery and business. Today, we're diving into the concept of Value Propositions, as outlined in the book "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers." This episode will explore how understanding your Value Propositions are crucial for crafting a successful business model in the creative industry. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, learning to identify your unique Value Propositions can transform your art into a thriving business.  The Business Model Canvas:  https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas How To Build a Start-up. By Steve Blank: https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245 Startup Owner's Manual. by Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/1119690684/ My Pottery Journal. By Al Wayman https://creekroadpottery.com/product/my-pottery-journal/ The Cost Analysis Spread sheet: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-cost-analysis-spread-sheet/ The Pottery Dailies: https://creekroadpottery.com/the-pottery-dailies/ The Creek Road Pottery LLC Blog: https://creekroadpottery.com/blog/ Creek Road Pottery Pen Pal Program: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-pen-pal-program/

Join Troy in a riveting conversation with James Baker, co-founder of Varicon, as they unveil the secrets behind growing a small business. Discover how James navigated challenges, scaled his team to 25, and achieved unparalleled success, exceeding revenue targets. Gain insights into strategic leadership and elevate your small business journey. Why would you wait any longer to start living the lifestyle you signed up for? Balance your health, wealth, relationships and business growth. And focus your time and energy and make the most of this year. Let's get into it by clicking here.   Troy delves into our guest's startup journey, their perception of success, industry reconsideration, and the pivotal stress point during business expansion. They discuss the joys of small business growth, vital entrepreneurial habits, and strategies for team building, encompassing wins, blunders, and invaluable advice.   And a snapshot of the final five Grow A Small Business Questions:   One of the toughest challenges in growing a small business is navigating the delicate balance between heeding valuable advice and trusting your own instincts. Entrepreneurs often face the dilemma of discerning when to follow conventional wisdom and when to rely on their unique insights. This challenge requires a blend of humility to learn from others and the confidence to make bold decisions based on your entrepreneurial vision. The favorite business book mentioned by James Baker is "No Rules Rules" by Reed Hastings, a co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix. This book delves into the unorthodox and innovative culture at Netflix, providing valuable insights into building and managing successful businesses. James Baker suggests exploring "The Duran Podcast" for geopolitical insights relevant to the venture-backed tech sector, the Lex Fridman Podcast for in-depth interviews on technology, and the "Jordan Peterson Podcast" for a profound exploration of cultural conflicts. Additionally, he suggests the "Entrepreneurial Operating System Program" for business strategy and development.    James Baker recommends "Strategizer," a toolkit that includes the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and the Testing Business Ideas toolkit for small business growth. This tool helps clarify business direction and prevents unnecessary spending, making it valuable for businesses starting out or undergoing major changes. James Baker would tell himself on day one of starting out five years ago to be exceptionally curious. He emphasizes that curiosity enables one to figure things out, surround themselves with the right people, discover opportunities, and navigate the entrepreneurial journey successfully. Book a 20-minute Growth Chat with Troy Trewin to see if you qualify for our upcoming course. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your small business to new heights! Enjoyed the podcast? Please leave a review on iTunes or your preferred platform. Your feedback helps more small business owners discover our podcast and embark on their business growth journey.     Quotable quotes from our special Grow A Small Business podcast guest: Investing in yourself and your team with professional development is one of the highest leverage things you can do – James Baker   Values are not something you aspire to; they are part of your DNA – James Baker   If you're curious, you can figure everything out as you go – James Baker      

Welcome to "The Pin Tool Podcast," hosted by Al Wayman, artist and owner of Creek Road Pottery LLC. This latest episode delves into the intricacies of the Business Model Canvas, a strategic tool essential for any artist who wants to become an entrepreneur. Join us as I try to unravel the complexities of this model, making it accessible and actionable for potters and creatives alike. Whether you're forming your business or your next mug, this episode will guide you in blending art with entrepreneurship. Let's get started! Recourses Mentioned: The Business Model Canvas:  https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-business-model-canvas How To Build a Start-up. By Steve Blank: https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245 Startup Owner's Manual. by Steve Blank: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/1119690684/ My Pottery Journal. By Al Wayman https://creekroadpottery.com/product/my-pottery-journal/ The Cost Analysis Spread sheet: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-cost-analysis-spread-sheet/ The Pottery Dailies: https://creekroadpottery.com/the-pottery-dailies/ The Creek Road Pottery LLC Blog: https://creekroadpottery.com/blog/ Creek Road Pottery Pen Pal Program: https://creekroadpottery.com/pottery-pen-pal-program/  

As the executive director for the Center for Regional Economic Advancement at Cornell (CREA) and a visiting lecturer at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, Tom Schryver helps entrepreneurs launch and scale new ventures—by starting with a solid idea.In this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast from eCornell, Schryver and host Chris Wofford discuss the components of good product concepts and more.Tune in to learn how to:Align with a five-point rubric for a good business ideaStart with a solution or start with a problemTake an experimentalist approachTest assumptions about product ideasCreate a business thesis and elevator pitchValidate ideas and use the Business Model CanvasUnderstand a minimum viable productFind an entrepreneurial communityTime outreach to investorsHandle setbacksLearn more about building successful ventures in eCornell's business and finance certificate programs, including Startup Funding and Finance and Business Management in STEM from Tom Schryver.CREA is a division of Research & Innovation at Cornell. Follow eCornell on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X.

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder, founder & CEO of Strategyzer, is one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts. A leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker, his work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. In this episode of Leadership NOW with Dan Pontefract, Alex lays out his nfluential ideas on modern business models, emphasizing the need for innovative strategies and a shift away from traditional business thinking. Continuously ranked in the top 50 management thinkers worldwide by Thinkers50 and a visiting professor at IMD, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mastercard, Sony, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. Strategyzer is an innovation powerhouse, providing online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation. Osterwalder's books include the international bestseller «Business Model Generation», «Value Proposition Design», «Testing Business Ideas», «High-Impact Tools for Teams» and «The Invincible Company,» A frequent and popular keynote speaker, Osterwalder travels the world discussing his ideas and strategies at Fortune 500 companies, premiere innovation conferences, and leading universities. He holds a doctorate from HEC Lausanne/Switzerland and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-for-profit organization connecting local responses to global issues around the world.

Hey folks and welcome to another cracking episode on This is HCD. Way back in 2017, I caught up with Greg Bernarda, Co-author of the best selling innovation book, Value Proposition Design by Strategyzer. I've known Greg for a long time, and in this episode we reflect on where the time between books, where he sees Value Proposition Design and also the Business Model Canvas in the current world. I truly respect Greg's mind and brain as one of the best thinkers around, and so too do Thinkers50 - a regular speaker at the their events. We tap into the work he's being doing around Leading Ecosystems, vs products or services. We speak about what business model's look like within organisations at the macular and also at scale. If you are working in spaces where you are trying to nudge the system towards becoming more customer or human-led, I think you will get a lot from this episode Now, before we jump in, today's episode is brought to you by our good friends at MIRO. I use MIRO on nearly all of my online training sessions with clients. I want to tell you why. In today's digital age, remote work is becoming increasingly common. MIRO is built with remote collaboration in mind, enabling teams to collaborate effectively, no matter where they are. One of the features that I haven't actually used until recently was the video conferencing feature from inside the application. This takes is to the next level!and think you will like it too Check https://www.miro.com/podcast to sign up for free and get 3 free canvases for life... Now, let's get into Greg's episode.. Watch this episode on our YouTube channel https://youtu.be/rnEWSCPzvHY Gregs links https://upruption.com/home/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbernarda/ https://www.strategyzer.com/library/value-proposition-design-2

Welcome to another inspiring episode of the Dyslexia Explored, where we delve into dyslexia and social entrepreneurship. We are thrilled to host our special guests, Shelley Gregory-Jones from Allia, a prominent fund dedicated to social entrepreneurship, and Marina Pritchard, the program coordinator fostering social entrepreneurship at Allia. Join us as we unravel the nexus between dyslexia, entrepreneurship, and the strides Allia is making to create a nurturing and empowering environment for dyslexic individuals venturing into the world of entrepreneurship.  In this enlightening conversation, we will be uncovering the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Allia, discussing the varied programs aimed at helping entrepreneurs overcome their growth barriers, and understand how these initiatives are designed with accessibility and inclusivity at the forefront. Learn how Allia is prioritizing the dyslexic community by creating an atmosphere where neurodiverse founders can unlock their potentials and thrive. This episode is sure to be an eye-opener for anyone interested in understanding how the entrepreneurial world can be tailored to accommodate the unique abilities of dyslexics. Links: Allia Future Business Centre: https://futurebusinesscentre.co.uk/our-programmes/ Business Model Canvas: https://canvanizer.com/new/business-model-canvas  Flipped Classroom Model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom  World Cafe Conference Concept: https://theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/  Simon Sink- Infinite Game: https://simonsinek.com/books/the-infinite-game/  Scary Smart: https://www.mogawdat.com/scary-smart  Human Compatible: https://futureoflife.org/resource/human-compatible-artificial-intelligence-and-the-problem-of-control/  Her (Film): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)    Coaching Dyslexia in the workplace: https://www.dyslexiawork.com/  Dyslexia Quiz: https://bulletmapacademy.com/dyslexia-quiz/ Bulletmap Academy Page: https://bulletmapacademy.com BulletMap Academy Courses: https://www.bulletmapacademy.com/courses   Dyslexia Productivity Coaching: http://dyslexiaproductivitycoaching.com/  Show notes: https://bulletmapacademy.com/blog/131/ Interested in being a guest? Email us at info@bulletmapacademy.com

How do you stimulate innovation?In this episode, Alex Osterwalder, CEO and Founder of Strategyzer, talks about what it takes to stimulate and pursue innovation in a difficult and dynamic context. He talks about why CEOs need to invest at least 40% of their time on innovation activities, how they should use new measures (AKIs that complement OKRs), and how to develop inclusive, high performing teams. Alex also talks about the implications for AI in innovation - how it can help develop prototypes and how it will encourage innovation professionals to up their game. “If you're not producing innovation results you're doing innovation theatre.” – Alex OsterwalderYou'll hear about:How organisations practise innovationWhy OKRs don't workSeparating exploration and exploitationCreating an innovation mindsetShould CEOs have split roles? The impact of ecosystems on innovationHow AI is being used in innovationDeveloping high performance inclusive teamsWhat are Alex's strengths?What is Alex's leadership style?The biggest sacrifices Alex has madeAbout Alex:  Alex is the CEO and Founder of Strategyzer, the company that provides corporate innovation strategy advice, tools, and training. He's the co-author of five books, including the Invincible Company and the Business Model Canvas. He is also a Visiting Professor at the IMD Business School. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Alex also holds the Thinkers50 Strategy Award.His resources:●      Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder/●      Strategzer: https://www.strategyzer.com/●      Books: https://www.strategyzer.com/booksMy resources:Sign up to my Strategic Leader newsletter (http://bit.ly/36WRpri) for stimuli, ideas, guidance and tips on how to lead your team, organisation or self more effectively, delivered straight to your inbox:Subscribe to my YouTube channel (http://bit.ly/3cFGk1k) where you can watch the conversation.Take the Extraordinary Essentials test (https://bit.ly/3EhSKY5) to identify your strengths and development areas as a strategic leader:For more details about me: ●      Services (https://bit.ly/373jctk) to CEOs, entrepreneurs and professionals.●      About me (https://bit.ly/3LFsfiO) - my background, experience and philosophy.●      Examples of my writing (https://bit.ly/3O7jkc7).●      Follow me and engage with me on LinkedIn (https://bit.ly/2Z2PexP).●      Follow me and engage with me on Twitter (https://bit.ly/36XavNI).

In this insightful episode, host Alex Oliveira digs deep into the world of starting a business. Drawing from his vast experience in entrepreneurship, Alex shares practical tips, valuable resources, and unique insights that can transform your business idea into a reality. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or simply curious about the startup landscape, this solo episode is a must-listen. Join Alex as he navigates through the exciting yet challenging journey of business creation – from conceptualizing your idea to launching and sustaining your startup. No guest, no distractions, just Alex imparting valuable knowledge on business startups. Tune in and let your entrepreneurial journey begin. Things to consider when starting a business   Business Idea: The first thing you need to consider is your business idea. What is it that you want to do? Your idea should be unique, but also feasible and in demand. Market Research: Identify your target market and understand the competition. What do your potential customers need, and how can your business meet those needs better than the competition? Business Plan: A well-structured business plan is essential. It should outline your business goals, target audience, marketing and sales strategies, and financial projections. It's your roadmap to success. Capital: Calculate the initial investment required to start your business. Identify sources of funding, be it personal savings, loans, investors, or grants. Legal Structure: Determine the legal structure of your business - sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, LLC, etc. This will impact tax obligations, potential personal liability and other legal aspects. Business Registration: Register your business with the appropriate government bodies to get your business name and other necessary legalities in place. Licenses and Permits: Research and obtain any necessary licenses, permits, and certifications required for your business to operate within the law. Location: Choose a location that is accessible to your target market and suitable for your type of business. This could be a physical storefront, an office, or a home office if you're running an online business. Brand Identity: Develop a strong brand. This includes your business name, logo, and overall aesthetic. Your brand should communicate your business's overall mission and appeal to your target market. Marketing and Sales Strategy: How will you attract and retain customers? Define your marketing and sales strategies. This could include a website, social media, advertising, networking, etc. Hiring: If your business is not a one-person operation, you'll need to hire staff. Consider what roles you need to fill, and start the recruitment and hiring process. Financial Management: Implement systems for managing your finances. This includes accounting, invoicing, managing payroll, monitoring expenses, etc. Customer Service: Establish a system for excellent customer service. Your relationship with your customers can make or break your business. Insurance: Protect your business from risks with the appropriate insurance policies. This might include general liability insurance, workers' compensation insurance, property insurance, etc. Growth Plan: Lastly, always look forward. Have a growth plan in place. This includes plans for scaling up operations, expanding the product or service line, entering new markets, etc.   Checklist for starting a business Evaluate Your Business Idea: Understand the feasibility, potential market, and profitability. Market Research: Study your potential customers and competition to validate the need for your business idea. Business Plan: Create a detailed business plan outlining your business model, strategies for marketing, operations, financial projections, etc. Business Structure: Decide on your business's legal structure (sole proprietorship, LLC, corporation, etc.). Business Name: Choose a unique, catchy, and appropriate name for your business. Register Your Business: Depending on your location, register your business with local, state, and federal authorities. Tax IDs: Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) or the equivalent in your country, and understand your tax responsibilities. Permits and Licenses: Find out which permits and licenses you need to operate legally, and apply for them. Business Location: Choose a suitable location for your business. Consider zoning laws, target market, accessibility, and cost. Business Insurance: Evaluate what kind of insurance your business needs (general liability, workers' compensation, property, etc.) and get covered. Finances: Set up a business bank account, consider a business credit card, set up accounting software, and plan how you will finance your startup costs. Build a Team: If you're not going it alone, you'll need to hire employees or bring on partners. Make sure you understand employment laws and regulations. Brand Identity: Create a logo, choose your business's color scheme, and start building your brand's overall visual identity. Website: Build a professional website. Even if your business is offline, an online presence is crucial in the modern business environment. Sales and Marketing Strategy: Determine how you will attract and retain customers. This includes social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, advertising, etc. Set Up Your Workspace: This could be a retail location, an office, a co-working space, or your home, depending on your business type. Business Operations: Establish your day-to-day operations. This could include sourcing suppliers, setting up your store (physical or online), etc. Customer Service Policies: Establish policies for customer interaction, returns, support, etc. Growth Plan: Have a clear plan for the future of your business. How will you scale, and what are your goals for the next 5 years? Launch: Plan and execute a launch strategy to create buzz and bring in customers.   The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It is divided into nine segments: Value Proposition Customer Segments Channels Customer Relationships Revenue Streams Key Resources Key Activities Key Partnerships Cost Structure According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the reasons small businesses often fail due to the following reasons: Lack of Capital: Many small businesses underestimate the amount of money they need to start and keep the business running. When they run out of capital, they can't sustain operations. Poor Planning: Many businesses fail due to lack of a proper business plan. A good plan includes financial projections, market analysis, marketing and sales strategies, among other things. Insufficient Market Demand: If there isn't enough demand for the product or service, a business can't generate sufficient revenue. This is why market research is crucial before starting a business. Bad Location: For businesses that rely on foot traffic, a poor location can doom the enterprise from the start. Online businesses can also suffer if their digital presence is weak or hard to find. Poor Management: Ineffective leadership and poor decision making can lead to business failure. This could include bad hiring decisions, poor financial management, or inadequate customer service. Competition: A saturated market or competition from larger, established companies can make it difficult for a small business to succeed. Lack of Online Presence: In today's digital age, not having an online presence or having a poorly managed one can severely affect a business. It's essential for businesses to effectively use online platforms for marketing and sales. Not Adapting to Market Changes: Businesses that fail to evolve with market trends, consumer behavior, or new technologies can quickly become obsolete. Lack of Business Knowledge or Experience: Running a business requires knowledge in many areas, like finance, management, marketing, and industry-specific knowledge. A lack of experience or knowledge in these areas can be detrimental. Poor Financial Management: Businesses need to have proper financial management, including cash flow management, cost management, and financial planning and analysis. If a business spends too much, doesn't track expenses, or doesn't plan for future financial needs, it may fail. Overexpansion: Growing too fast can be just as detrimental as not growing at all. Overexpansion often leads to weakened operations and quality, and potential financial problems.

LEGO is one of the world's best-loved and most familiar brands, adored by generations of children (and podcast hosts and listeners).  What is less well known, perhaps, is its journey over the last 20 years which has required significant innovation.  Granted unprecedented access to every part of the LEGO Group, David Robertson, for his book 'Brick by Brick', not only charted each twist in the company's story but analyses the nature of the challenges and how they were overcome.  The lessons he distills from such an epic journey can be used to inform leadership decision making, digital transformations and innovation strategies today.Dave, Sjoukje & Rob talk with David (MIT Sloane School of Management & Horton School at University of Pennsylvania & author of 'Enterprise Architecture as Strategy', 'Brick by Brick' and 'The Power of Little Ideas') about his work with LEGO and how his findings helps drive and govern innovation.  How do you think not only "outside the box" but also "around the box" and how does the Business Model Canvas help with categorising and organising around innovation?  We begin and end the conversation with the advantages and disadvantages of using Enterprise Architecture...TLDR:00:45 Intros02:03 Cloud conversation with David Robertson37:00 Is there a role of Enterprise Architecture in an Agile world?45:16 New book looking at the next phase of the LEGO journey!Further reading:Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: https://amzn.eu/d/68ezC9wBrick by Brick: https://amzn.eu/d/3q3IsiXPower of Little Ideas: https://amzn.eu/d/69Zq7UqGuestDavid Robertson:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidchrobertson/HostsDave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Sjouke Zaal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjoukjezaal/Rob Kernahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/Production Marcel Van Der Burg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-van-der-burg-99a655/Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/SoundBen Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/

Better Innovation listeners who have been with us for a few years may feel a sense of déjà vu with this episode. Today's guest, Alex Osterwalder - inventor of the Business Model Canvas, founder & CEO of Strategyzer, and one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts - appeared on the show back in November 2018 to speak with Jeff in front of a live audience. Alex and Jeff discussed how organizations can thrive with renewed attention to business modeling.   2018 now feels like a lifetime ago . . . Seeking updated insights from Alex, Jeff hosts a discussion on a new culture of innovation that has emerged and how organizations can reframe their approach to innovation in the context of today's volatile global landscape. Listen-in as Jeff and Alex catch-up and address how business challenges should be converted to innovation challenges to achieve new breakthroughs.