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6 episodes with business model generation
12 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
2 episodes with business model generation
Ruud Hendriks en Richard Bross praten met Patrick van der Pijl. Patrick van der Pijl is strategisch ontwerper, ondernemer en CEO van Business Model Ink. Hij is medeproducent van de bestseller Business Model Generation en reist de wereld rond als innovatie-expert. In deze aflevering bespreken zij hoe Patrick de kracht van visuele strategie ontdekte, het belang van businessmodellen en hoe hij zijn bedrijf door moeilijke tijden leidde. In deze aflevering: Hoe Patrick zijn bedrijf opnieuw uitvond na de coronacrisis De kracht van het Business Model Canvas Waarom relevantie als ondernemer een continu werkwoord is Het persoonlijke verhaal achter Patrick's moeilijkste periode Hoe innovatie bedrijven helpt te overleven in een snel veranderende wereld Hashtags: #Doorzetters #PatrickVanDerPijl #Ondernemerschap #BusinessModel #BusinessModelGeneration #Podcast Contact Doorzetters: Feedback: bo@doorzetters.net Contact: www.doorzetters.net/contact Episode links Patrick van der Pijl: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickpijl/ en https://www.instagram.com/businessmodelsinc/ X: https://x.com/BusModInc Website: https://www.businessmodelsinc.com/en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppijl/ en https://www.linkedin.com/company/business-models-inc/ Sponsors: Amdax: https://amdax.com/nl - Veilig in crypto met de vertrouwde bewaarpartner van Nederland. Owow: https://owow.io/ - Innovatieve websites voor doorzetters. Sprints and Sneakers: https://www.sprintsandsneakers.com/ - Growth hacking voor jouw succes. Timestamps: 0:00 – Introductie 4:00 – Hoe Patrick zijn bedrijf weer op de rails kreeg na de coronacrisis 10:30 – Het belang van visuele strategie in innovatie 20:15 – Hoe blijf je relevant als ondernemer? 30:45 – Patrick's moeilijkste periode: verlies en herstel 40:00 – De kracht van het Business Model Canvas Tips van deze aflevering: Tip van Richard: Blijf altijd innoveren en wees niet bang om te pivoteren. Tip van Patrick: Wees niet bang om hulp te vragen, zelfs op de moeilijkste momenten. Tip van Ruud: Relevantie blijft het belangrijkste. Blijf altijd werken aan je eigen innovatie. Doorzetters links: Website: www.doorzetters.net Spotify: https://ap.lc/KsUHP Apple Podcast: https://ap.lc/doByt DoorzettersGPT: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-677919e6e49481918873dff89bea49e2-doorzetters Social Media links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/doorzetters-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doorzetters_podcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doorzetters_podcast X (Twitter): https://x.com/DoorzettersX BlueSky: @doorzetters.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1679: Christine Comaford breaks down the essentials of crafting a business plan that truly drives growth, emphasizing clarity, purpose, and alignment across teams. Learn how to communicate your vision, set achievable objectives, and engage both logic and emotion to create buy-in from investors and stakeholders. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/how-to-create-a-killer-business-plan/ Quotes to ponder: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." "A business plan is a tool that communicates your vision, inspires others to join you, and keeps everyone on track." "Facts tell. Stories sell." Episode references: Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder: https://www.strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation Start With Why by Simon Sinek: https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1679: Christine Comaford breaks down the essentials of crafting a business plan that truly drives growth, emphasizing clarity, purpose, and alignment across teams. Learn how to communicate your vision, set achievable objectives, and engage both logic and emotion to create buy-in from investors and stakeholders. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/how-to-create-a-killer-business-plan/ Quotes to ponder: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." "A business plan is a tool that communicates your vision, inspires others to join you, and keeps everyone on track." "Facts tell. Stories sell." Episode references: Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder: https://www.strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation Start With Why by Simon Sinek: https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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.
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...
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!
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!
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
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.
"A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers"
Time, productivity and stress are key issues that affect our work. Get it right, and you'll be in flow, productive and happier. However, poor time management means reduced efficiency, increased stress and takes us in the wrong direction.With my guest, Matt Pattison, we discuss these challenges and areas to provide insights and answers. Using Matt's skillset of design thinking, combined with my knowledge of psychology and human behaviour, we endeavour to give you practical steps to take away and apply.The main points you'll learn are:Design is a way of thinking and seeing the world and you can apply it in your world and work to.Connection - real world connection with other people.Human behaviour - reactions, responses and we are influenced by our mind and our environment. Working with both will positively impact you.Design your day - it's your life and your calendar so design it in a way that is aligned to your natural body's needs. Stress - it's how we respond to stressors that is vital. Understand yourself and your needs and how you respond to events.Matt Pattison BIOMatt's eclectic career has taken him from clinician to researcher, designer to film maker. He works tirelessly to design products and services that represent the lives and needs of everyday people across context and culture. He describes himself as a multi passionate entrepreneur and for anyone who might have spoken with him you know conversations can go deep, future focused and diverse pretty quickly. So we will see where this one goes.Links & ReferencesMatt's Design Thinker course: Apply design thinking to your work, your life and yourself [FREE]Matt's Mindful Eating course - Slow The Fork DownReferenced books Matt discussed and a couple more.1. Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design by Osterwalder et al. 2. Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just 5 days Jake Knapp et al3. Make Time- Jake Knapp et al Also worth a look:4. Tiny Habits - BJ Fogg5. Gary Brecka on Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett - Episode 225 [Feb 2023]Sal's link and referencesGeorge Miller 1956. Research into how many things we can hold in our attention. +/- 7 pieces of information Research on brain processing Early morning daylight affecting the cortisol ‘pulse' and circadian rhythms Get in touch with SalIf this episode has caught your attention and you wish to learn more, then please contact me. I offer a free 20 min call where we can discuss a challenge your facing and how I may be able to help you.
#120 - Quel est le meilleur modèle de stratégie?La stratégie, de sa formulation à sa mise en œuvre, est un sujet récurrent sur ce podcast. Les méthodes et approches pour traiter de stratégie aussi. C'est pourquoi lorsqu'un auteur important en parle, nous aimons comparer ce qu'il ou elle dit à notre pratique et à nos idées sur ce sujet. Depuis la révolution industrielle et l'émergence des grandes entreprises industrielles qui en a résulté, il y a relativement peu de modèles discutant de stratégie, la plupart étant relativement récents. Cette fois, c'est Roger Martin qui compare ce qu'il appelle des cadres stratégiques complets et il n'en voit que deux: Business Model Generation et Playing to Win. C'est de cette comparaison, et des limites de ces modèles/canevas, dont nous voulons vous parler aujourd'hui.Consultez les notes complètes de l'épisode ici: https://www.intelliaconsulting.com/episode120Suivez-nous: Abonnez-vous à nos communications hebdomadaires sur la stratégie, l'innovation et la transformation des organisations sur notre site internet: https://www.intelliaconsulting.com Visitez notre page LinkedIn Visitez notre page YouTube Téléchargez la Playlist des 100 épisodes ici
Michael hjalp Alexander Osterwalder med at gøre Business Model Canvas til et anvendeligt værktøj i virksomheder og skabe fundamentet for bogen Business Model Generation. Men, hvorfor er det afgørende, at virksomheder udfordrer deres forretningsmode? Inspiration til at forstå din virksomhed bedre: https://atturde.dk/bullets Kontakt, feedback og spørgmål: brian@atturde.dk
Welcome to our first "Learning On the Edge" episode where your cohosts, Nita and Sylvia, share their expertise on human-centred design and its application towards Social Innovation. In this episode, we share our learnings and personal experiences around Empathy and use of the design tool, the Empathy Map, towards humanizing healthcare experiences. This episode also provides a brief recap of "On the Edge with SIC" Episodes 1 to 4 through an Empathy Lens. Resources Nita's blog post about empathy in design: https://www.sichealth.ca/post/yoda-as-an-ei-master Design Lab podcast with Bon Ku, Episode 112: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/112 Careful, kind care is our compass out of the pandemic fog, Allwood & Montori, 2022: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-073444 Why We Revolt by Victor Montori: https://www.patientrevolution.org/book Empathy Map from the book Business Model Generation by Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010 Credit - Music High in the Sky - AlexiAction from Pixabay (royalty free) --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sichealth/message
If you liked "Business Model Generation," you'll love "Value Proposition Design." The sequel builds on the same visual format and practical tools that made the first one so useful. It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It compliments and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvasfrom "Business Model Generation" so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models. Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work. The book includes an online access to Strategyzer.com to complete and assess exercises interactively, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more. You'll love "Value Proposition Design" if you've been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea."Value Proposition Design" will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work, and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.
Business Model Generation is a practical, inspiring handbook for anyone striving to improve a business model or craft a new one. 1) Change the way you think about business models Business Model Generation will teach you powerful and practical innovation techniques used today by leading companies worldwide. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a new business model or analyze and renovate an old one. 2) Co-created by 470 strategy practitioners Business Model Generation practices what it preaches. Co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book was financed and produced independently of the traditional publishing industry. It features a tightly-integrated, visual, lie-flat design that enables immediate hands-on use. 3) Designed for doers Business Model Generation is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new, innovative models of value creation: executives, consultants, entrepreneurs and leaders of all organizations.
This episode is with Alex Osterwalder - Author of best-selling books Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, and his latest book, The Invincible Company. He's been ranked No.4 of the top 50 management thinkers globally, and he's the co-founder of Strategyzer, which helps companies expand existing business lines, build new growth enginges, de-risk innovation ideas, and up-skill teams. In this episode we talk about how to build an invincible company through business model innovation.
Interview video available here: https://youtu.be/F3X1BC_HQws Bio Bruno Pešec helps business leaders innovate profitably. He is the rare innovator who can claim that he's worked on a regulation-defying freight train and an award-winning board game. In addition to his corporate experience with brands like DNV, DNB, and Kongsberg Group, Bruno runs a community of entrepreneurs of several thousand members. Longer version of bio available at https://www.pesec.no/about/ Websites/ Social Media Bruno's website: pesec.no Playing Lean site: https://www.playinglean.com/ LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pesec/ Books The 9 Big Don'ts of Corporate Innovation by Bruno Pešec https://www.pesec.no/9-big-donts-of-corporate-innovation/ The Corporate Startup by Tendayi Viki https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corporate-Startup-Established-Successful-Innovation/dp/9462761507 The Game Changing Strategy by Constantinos Markides https://www.amazon.co.uk/Game-Changing-Strategies-Established-Industries-Breaking/dp/0470276878 To Better Thinking by Linda Elder https://www.amazon.co.uk/Better-Thinking-Living-Through-Critical/dp/0133092569 The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig https://www.amazon.co.uk/Effect-Business-Delusions-Deceive-Managers/dp/1476784035 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drive-Surprising-Truth-about-Motivates/dp/B004N74VBK 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. Guest Intro: Hello everyone, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. My guest today is Bruno Pešec. He is one of those rare innovators and coaches whose focus is on helping business leaders innovate profitably. I had lots of learning moments and ‘aha' moments speaking with Bruno and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I learnt a lot as well. I have no doubt that you will also get some useful nuggets from this episode, so enjoy. Ula Ojiaku: I have with me here, Bruno Pešec. And, Bruno, welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, it's a great pleasure and honour to have you here on the show. Bruno Pešec: Thank you very much, Ula. And I also want to give my special gratitude and thanks for perfectly pronouncing my surname. Ula Ojiaku: Oh, well, I am very happy about that. I actually wrote it out, you know, phonetically on a piece of paper. But thanks, you taught me well, great. Now let's go straight into the questions we have for you today. So, who is Bruno Pešec? Bruno Pešec: So, Bruno Pešec is, I will describe an Innovator, Martial Artist and Engineer, that probably sums up like parts of my life that I'm proudest, and that I engage with the most. So, I started my studies as a young engineer, and what I was really fascinated with are problems, wicked problems. Usually wicked problems are described as a collection of problems that don't really have a clear cause, clear root cause, and there is no clear-cut solution, the only thing you can try to do is tame them a little bit, and I was fascinated with that as engineer. That's why I studied industrial engineering, which is a combination of systems and humans. I started my career in defense, and I had the good fortune of working on some very, very difficult products. And one of the projects that I was working on was an innovation completely based on product and technology. We made such a product that was by far the best in the whole world, it was so good, no one believed us. And it was ridiculous, but for me, it was a great learning experience, because, you know, we were a young group of engineers that said, like, hey, let's just do everything we can to make the best product we can, and we succeeded, and nobody on the market believed us. So, what happened, our sales department had to send our product on a tour across the globe. And with a lot of engineering products and solutions, they can be copied by sufficiently proficient engineers, and that is what happened after a few years. It wasn't such a leading product anymore. But for me, it was a very important learning lesson, because I realised that innovation isn't just about this technical side, but also about the human side, you must understand how to talk about innovation, you must understand how narratives form, how stories form and how people interact. And that is kind of how I started to slowly expand my own knowledge beyond just being an engineer, to also invest in a lot of time and effort to understand psychology, human nature, emotions, not just to reading, but also to try to be different myself, whatever that might mean. And it wasn't always pleasant. Ula Ojiaku: I totally empathise - wow! Could you tell us a bit more about the product? What was the product all about? Bruno Pešec: So, since I was working in industry, that's, you know, very limited with NDAs. So unfortunately, I can't really go into great specifics, but let's say that innovations were based on the physical properties. And I can say, you know, people expect that the products made out of steel have a specific weight, what we were able to do is, through a lot of engineering trades, using numerical simulations, very advanced computation, a lot of testing in actual manufacturing whole, we were able to make a product that has varying thickness of steel panels, and that reduce the weight of the product and increase the functionality of the product. And that's why I say, when a smart engineer sees the solution, they can easily copy it, but the challenge is seeing the solution, coming to see that. So, we did the heavy working of finding the new improvement, and then it was easy to take over. And if we connect it to what a lot of companies and startups mess up, when they spend their time and effort to educate the market and then somebody else comes and actually picks up the market. So that is, you know, when you have the whole discussion, is it good to be first to the market? Yes, if you can afford to capture it. Ula Ojiaku: Yes. Yes. Very true, because you have the fast followers who just sit back, let you do the heavy lifting and then they, because they have maybe a wide range of resources and deep pockets, are able to mass manufacture what you spent years to put together. Wow! Bruno Pešec: Exactly. Ula Ojiaku: So, what were the key lessons, because you said you now realise that it's not just about having a fantastic product, you also had to focus on the human psychology. So, what's different between then and now? Bruno Pešec: So, one of the things, reflecting here in the moment, one of the very important lessons, for me personally, was that alignment is much more important and valuable than being the most correct person in the room, or following the perfect or the ideal process. So for myself, you know, I have a decade of experience innovating and inventing, not just in defense, but also in transportation in oil and gas, in entertainment, you know, in different industries. And without trying to sound arrogant, I have a good grasp of what it takes to, you know, develop, invent something and take it to the market, which is not necessarily always true. So, when I work, you know, with clients or different teams, I'm usually the person who knows the innovation process, but that doesn't matter a lot if I cannot help those people in the room to actually get from A to B. And that sometimes includes, I don't want to say compromises, but negotiations, both internal implicit, but also external, you know, when do you stop focusing on just the theory and when do you move to, okay, in practice being pragmatic, and moving on. And I would say that Agile and Innovation and Lean and Lean Startup and a lot of these fields, they're guilty of being extremely dogmatic and paradigmatic, and then you have this whole conversation around, okay, when is it about dogma and when is it about flow, customer, value, outcomes? So, that, to me was part of my learning journey, like, sometimes harsh lessons. Ula Ojiaku: I totally am nodding because I experienced this every day, as you know, as an Agile Coach, it's really about, you might know things, you know, but it's also about working with people, because finally, at the end of the day, it's all about people and you need to work with people, you need to establish the relationship, the trust. And for me, a policy is I want to work with people in a way that they would want to work with me over and over again. And sometimes this may be about losing a battle so that you know, everyone can together win the greater war, you know, from time to time. One statement you made now that really stood out to me is that; “Alignment is more valuable than being the most correct person in a room”. That's a great quote. Okay, so can you tell us about your game Playing Lean? I understand you developed the game, how did it come about and what do you currently use it for? Bruno Pešec: So yes, it's called Playing Lean, and I'd be happy to tell you a bit more. So, it's funny, it came through part of this learning experience as well. So, I'm not the only one, it was also Simen Fure Jørgensen, he is the guy that actually started it as well. So, the starting point was very simple. You have a group of people, and you want to introduce a new concept. In this case, it was Lean Startup. And you know how it will go, if you tell two groups of people where here's a book, read it, let's talk in a week. So, maybe there's one person that reads it, the rest might skim it, and the, you know, the other third won't even open it. And what we were inspired with was using games. We were actually inspired with Get Kanban if you know the game for teaching Kanban in software development. And back in that time, Simen just tried to find a similar game for teaching Lean Startup Innovation, entrepreneurship, and there was none, and that was the trigger. So, it was scratching our own need, and what I love and what I'm the proudest was that we used the Lean Startup principles to develop the game itself. That was very important to us, and to the listeners that maybe have heard about Lean Startup but aren't as familiar. So, Lean Startup is a methodology for developing businesses through experimentation, iterative development, and it basically relies on Agile body of knowledge, customer development and business modeling. So, in our case, we decided after we have iterated a lot on the functionality and the desirability of the game, we decided to go down a crowdfunding route. And what happened, it was a big failure. So, we didn't manage to reach our goal, but when we were reviewing, so it wasn't zero, but it was not enough money to actually take us, so, we used Kickstarter as a platform, which is all or nothing, you must reach the goal, otherwise, you receive no funds, but you can see the data. And what we noticed is that the people that were supporting the campaign actually weren't who we thought the players are, but who would use the game to teach Lean Startup. And that is when we realised, hey, our customer segment isn't really the people that will play the game to learn lean startup, but our customer segment is actually people like you and me, Ula, that consult and coach and help others. Now when we realised that, we started focusing, okay, what do these people need? What are their jobs to be done, what is important to them? And then tweak the product, what we learned is to them, what's really important is that the product is extremely polished, they need to be proud of it, it shouldn't look like you know, Microsoft clipboard, or clipart, whatever, it needs to look very professional. So, we partnered with Holger who is one of the best illustrators in the world, he illustrated Business Model Generation and other things like that. So, we partnered with him, the game looks spectacular. Okay, then we said it needs to be reputable. So, we partnered with Ash Maurya who wrote Running Lean, we partnered with Alexander Osterwalder who wrote Business Model Generation and few other books in the series, that was important. And then what was also the thing is the facilitators and coaches and consultants, they're not buying the game, they're buying a new product for their coaching or consulting portfolio. So, our value proposition is the game, plus the facilitating materials, plus the marketing materials, plus everything. So, a lot of learning happened, you know, in that one failed campaign. And then we kept iterating on that, and they usually say the rest is history, I hope it's still not history. But you know, we won awards, first game was completely sold out, we made a new one, that one is also almost sold out, we have a global community of 200 Facilitators. So, it's been going pretty well. And all of this, you know, learning, learning, learning, adjusting, learning, adjusting, learning, adjusting, learning, adjusting. Ula Ojiaku: You're basically applying the, you know, the Lean Startup cycle as well, because you're adjusting, you learn, you take the learning you're adjusting, and you make an improvement on what's existing. Congratulations. Now, that's an amazing story. And the fact that you said, you know, the Kickstarter failed, it wasn't a failure, it was more of a redirection, because you now got to focus on the right customer, the person who needs the product. Yeah and so, I also understand from your website that you sort of run, Train the Trainer sessions on Playing Lean, is that correct? Bruno Pešec: That's correct. That's correct. Ula Ojiaku: Okay, and when is your next one? Do you have any scheduled in the near future, or, you know, should listeners just go to the website and register? Bruno Pešec: So, listeners can go to playinglean.com. And what we decided to do because of COVID, obviously, and the global situation, so we have a completely self-paced part. So, you can take it any time, and then when you complete it, we schedule, so we have batches of people. So, let's say that you immediately go, you hear this show, and you go, you can take it, you can listen to all the theory or the facilitation, Playing Lean facilitator training. And then when there's four or six, we schedule a private session where we play the game together, and you know, let's say, finish the training, and we came to that because it's pretty flexible for people. And as I said, our customer segments are consultants and coaches, and the thing that they really don't want is to lose their precious billable time. Ula Ojiaku: Yes, yes. And will the follow up sessions, will they have to be in person or have you devised a way of doing it virtually? Bruno Pešec: So, everything is completely virtual for the time being. So, we're using Mural, but any of these can work. And what we basically did is we took and we recreated the whole game in that setup, and I was a bit skeptical at first. I wasn't 100% sure that, you know, it would work in such a setting because it is a board game, Playing Lean is a physical board game, and we purposefully designed it to be physical. Before all this happened, we rejected to make it digital, because there's a special connection when you're doing that together. And so I wasn't sure if we go with, we move it online, but people were asking so much, like, they want to play, they want to attend it. So, we said okay, let's give it a try. What we actually found out was that it works in some cases better, and in some worse. So, one thing that you lose is people cannot talk at the same time. I'm sure that everybody noticed that now with all zoom and Teams and all the meetings is, it's very difficult, you cannot talk at the same time, which does happen in physical meetings, you might have small groups of people either whispering or saying something. Here, that doesn't work, so, you must facilitate and arrange everything differently. You can have breakouts, but again, you cannot see it as a facilitator. When you coach team, you know, if you tell two of them have a discussion, you can slightly overhear. Yeah, now, you lose that. So, there are some challenges in this. But I'm pleasantly surprised, you know, thinking back 10 years ago, how many digital tools we have today and they're good. They work. Ula Ojiaku: True, true, I mean, that's why we're speaking although we're in different geographical locations. So yeah, definitely. Right, so, I know that you also recently published the book, an E-book, “Nine Big Don'ts of Corporate Innovation: How to Spot and Avoid Costly Innovation Mistakes”, can you tell us a bit more about this? Bruno Pešec: I'd love to. So, the starting point for this, were something that's usually called survivor bias. And I'll just share two stories to kind of illustrate the survivor bias. And funnily, both include aviation. So, in one case is Aeroplane Inspectors, so whatever is their formal title, were investigating plane crashes, and survivals. And what they noticed was that it wasn't the most important, how physically prepared people in the plane were, it didn't matter if they are obese, or if they're healthy, unhealthy, or whatnot, the only thing that mattered, was if people stopped to take their belongings before evacuating the plane. So, everybody who stopped to try to get their, you know, things from the overhead department perished. And that is why you always hear that boring message, back in the time when we were flying much more often, you know, take oxygen first in case of evacuation, ignore your belongings, go out. So, and they discovered it by focusing on all those that perished, not those that actually did manage to run out and escape before the plane caught fire. A similar story, but from wartime, was when they were looking into reinforcing fighter crafts. So, they were looking, they were charting, when the crafts returned, they were charting all the holes on the body of the plane. And then their initial idea was to focus on all the parts where the holes were. But one guy observed and said, “No, that's wrong. Because those planes return, let's take look where there are no holes, because where there are no holes, those planes did not return”. And then they reinforced that and that increased the survivability of the plane. So, this is, it's almost like inversion of thinking. And that survivor bias at the core is, hey, sometimes there is value in looking at all those that failed, and understanding why did that fail, and avoiding the things that they were doing? And that was the logic, that was something that started me here. So, I worked with hundreds of innovators with, I don't, I can't say hundreds of companies, but when you work with a large company, you know, it's easily several hundred people. And I continue to see the same mistakes again, and again and again. And I said, you know, it's not about trying to copy Amazon, or Google or whoever you think is the most innovative company in the world. Stop, pause and take a look at all the failed innovations. And that was kind of the trigger that is, so from experience and observation, I decided to share mine. I will not go into great details of all mine, because everybody who listens to this can get the e-book for free in your show notes, they will be able to find it. If not, they can reach out to you, to me, whoever, we're going to help them. But one that I want to share with your listeners is one of maybe a little bit shocking ones that I say is don't invest in orphans, orphan ideas, and what do I mean by that is ideas by themselves are worthless. We keep hearing that, but we don't take action on that. So, an idea doesn't come out of nowhere, someone must have recommended it, and on the management level, a common mistake is when, let's say there's a group or strategy retreat, and they hire some consultant, they come up with brilliant ideas, but they don't execute on it, they give it to someone else to do it. So, there is a discrepancy, there is this idea, it came from Ula, but suddenly it was thrown to Bruno, go do it. I never met Ula in my life, I'm supposed to be passionate about this? Ula Ojiaku: Exactly. You don't know the context behind the whole idea? How did it come about? But, no, these things happen and I'm thinking of a recent example. Bruno Pešec: But it is, it you know, it is something that resonates, and people are aware of it, but they don't think about it this way, and then they don't realise how damaging this is. And especially, so I don't want to sugarcoat it. Innovation, in a large company, is a very painful process, it is very punishing on people, it's very rarely rewarding, and people that do deal with innovation in companies, they don't do it to get tapped on the back, they do it because they derive pleasure from it, they derive joy from it. But that does not mean that they shouldn't be rewarded, but those people that are like that, they're rare. So usually, you know, I see that happen again, and again, a company decides ‘we want to be innovative'. Everybody, you know, there's a training for everybody in the company, and we will have like, big company meeting from today on, you must be innovative, and, you know, it's forced down the throat. And suddenly, people, you must work on this project, it's very difficult. It's difficult to force people to go through such pain for nothing. Ula Ojiaku: Like you said, innovation is not something you force down people's throats, it has to align with their intrinsic motivation, I believe it was Daniel Pink that wrote the book Drive about what motivates people. And, at the very least, they have to know what's in it for them, which goes back to, you know, your earlier statement about, you're dealing with human beings, you need to understand the psychology, how do you get people's buy in? How do you make sure that they want to do it, even if you're not there watching them? Yeah. Right. So, you've shared one of the don'ts, which is don't invest in orphans, do you want to share maybe one or two more of those ‘don'ts' in corporate innovation? Bruno Pešec: So, the last one, don't make how much time, effort and money you have spent so far, guide your decision. That is also a very common one, it happens to all of us in private life, in business life, I'm sure you experienced this, well, you know, when you're sitting there, the project isn't going as it should be going. And then somebody says, well, we've been going at this for two years, we spent, you know, so much money, we hired people for this, you know, let's keep on doing it, and if that is your only reason to keep on doing it, I'm sorry, this probably doesn't have a very bright future. And the same goes for innovation projects and companies, you know, after some time, you should just cut the losses. It's kind of if you've spent two years and there is no traction in the market, it's just not attracting attention. It's better, you know, to stop leaking more funds, and even worse than that is people's time, like, as far as we know, time goes in only one direction, we can make money again. But to me, especially in large companies, what every leader has is additional responsibility for the time of their employees. The most disrespectful thing you can do is waste somebody's time. It happens, unfortunately, often because people don't understand that it's happening. But when you walk into a room, and you tell someone that they've spent two years on something that's at a dead end, what you did, you threw away two years of their life, they could have been doing something else. Ula Ojiaku: True, true. And there's nothing more demoralising than you know, you're going on a road that's a dead end, and everybody knows it, but nobody wants to say, you know, “are we actually headed in the right direction?” And there's a phrase, I mean, this is in in the scaled agile framework, which is one of the, you know, popular scaling agile frameworks. One of the principles there is to ignore sunk costs. And you know, that's basically, you don't base decisions for the future based on how much time, money, effort, resources, that you've put into it. You have to evaluate it based on the results you're getting - are you getting the outcomes? I mean, if you had if you had made a hypothesis, has the hypothesis been validated or not, if it's not been validated, and you're getting, your indications are contrary to what you expected, it's either you pivot or you kill it. You don't just go on for sentimental reasons. So, no, great one. Yeah. Do you want to add anything else about your e-book? Is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience? Bruno Pešec: Well, we could probably go for several hours discussing everything in it. But what I can just say is that, besides just discussing these different don'ts, I also offer specific countermeasures. So, that is something for example, for the sunk cost I completely agree with what you shared. Unfortunately, the side effect is, if you run into someone that doesn't want to see exactly how you describe it, so like, no, no, no, no, that experiment wasn't done correctly, or I wasn't involved in that hypothesis, then one easy countermeasure is to immediately agree on the spot, okay, I see, I understand that you're very involved in that you, you know, your ego is in this. So, let's make an agreement right here, right now. What is it? What terms are we giving to this? What terms are we giving to this to continue? So, we, for example, this is a real one, but I'm removing the details, because of confidentiality. With one executive, he had exactly that problem. He was working on something for three years and he was afraid that if he would stop this, that his career would suffer as well. So, we sat down with his management team, and we said, okay, we are not now ready to immediately kill it, even though we have spent so much, but we're going to give it exactly three more months, and A, B and C, if that happens, it continues. As clear as that, signed by everybody, not for legal reasons, but for psychological reasons. You know, I put my name on this, I commit to these terms. Three months later, they kill it, we didn't even discuss it for five minutes. It was, you know, this is what we said, it didn't happen. Bam! I was shocked, I was shocked how easy that went. So that is, you know, an easy one, because people need to own that, I cannot tell people go and kill it, they must see like, oh, we really should stop this. Ula Ojiaku: Exactly. And there's something about a public commitment as well, it kind of, you know, makes it easier for all parties involved. You know, there is a rational reason for killing it and a rational reason for stopping an initiative, if that makes sense. Now, I'm going to ask you a question as a, you know, you teach innovation and entrepreneurship. Have you ever been in a situation where you've been asked to coach, you know, maybe a team or a particular area, so you have like the leadership buy in, and you've been asked to coach the team, but the team are kind of a bit closed to getting input from you? If so, what have you, you know, could you share with the audience what you've done to win them over or, and get them to actually get to a point where they are seeking and actively drawing your input into what they're doing? Bruno Pešec: So, I had that happen both at the management level and at the team level. So, in one case, I walked in with a team, and the guy immediately told me as I walked through the door, Bruno, this is bull****, I'm here, just because I was commanded to be here. You know, you have three minutes. And I just completely ignored him, I just looked at him, I was like, okay, so, and started the discussion. Why are we here? What do we want to get? In my case, I usually try to avoid confrontation in that sense, because people are, they have the right to be frustrated. Like, if they have really been commanded and just said, "You be here”. You know, it's kind of, I might recognise that and say, okay, I understand that, I'm not here to do innovation theatre, so I don't, how could I say, I don't really do training. When I'm brought in, I do very specific things. So, in this case, I'm really relying a lot on my background as engineer because they can see that I'm one of them in most of the cases, so I'm not like a manager or a sales guy or something like that, I'm very curious. I'm curious about their work, and this is where we start. We start talking about their specific product or service. Understanding that, and I just let them talk, and that's the easiest one, it's kind of, I'm not there to be smarter than them, I'm there because I'm good at the part of the process, and together, we're going to figure out what needs to be achieved, and sometimes they have very strong feelings. I know exactly what needs to be done, but no one in management is listening to me, and then I go, okay, I'm here, I'm listening to you, now share. And we just start from there. And people usually do have, and it is a great starting point, they will say, you know, this product sucks, because of A, B, and C, what needs to happen is X, Y, and Z. And then I start probing, it's like, okay, the things that you said that it sucks, why is that so? Okay, and you say that this will be a solution, why do you think so? And I ask them, we start to have a whiteboard, we start mapping it, if we don't know, we have this conversation, we start going to very specific things. Because what I strongly believe in is go harsh on problems, go harsh on issues, but be gentle with people. So, if you and I, you know, I will always have my utmost respect for Ula, but when we have a problem in front of us, when I go harsh, I'm not going to harsh on Ula, I'm going harsh on the problem. Ula Ojiaku: Don't take it personally. Bruno Pešec: Exactly. I want to rip the problem apart. That's our job as innovators, you have an idea, it's not about kissing that idea on the cheek, it's about breaking it seeing you know, what, if we do this, is it going to hold? What if we do this is it going to hold? What if we do that, is it still going to hold? If not, well maybe this is worth doing, it has nothing to do with you as a person. You and I, we are in a partnership about solving that problem, that issue, and for me, it works because it's genuine and people can feel that. So, I'm, you know, I'm being authentic, I'm being myself. And that is why I also say when people ask me, okay, Bruno, how can I coach like you? How can I, you know, repeat the same thing? I tell them, don't try to copy, you know, I am me, you are you, play to your strength. If you're a quiet person, if you're a gentle person, play to that, you know, be like water, be like river, wear them out, you know, wear them out with kindness, always go back to what you're discussing, be yourself. It's so tiring trying to be somebody else, it's so tiring trying to copy somebody else. It won't always work, but you will know that you were yourself, you did the best you could what's then there left to regret, even if it goes bad. Ula Ojiaku: True, true. I'm beginning to get suspicious that you've been eavesdropping on me, because I recently this week, gave a talk on being yourself and being that perfectly, so it's almost like, hmm, did Bruno eavesdrop on my speech? But hey, well said, well said. Now, let's just round up with a few more questions. This has been a fantastic conversation, I definitely have enjoyed speaking with you. Are there any books that you'd say you've drawn inspiration over the course of your career? You know, if so, what books are these? If you can share? Bruno Pešec: Since the topics we have discussed today, were about innovation and a little bit of thinking better, I'll share three specific books. So, one for innovation. That is The Corporate Startup by Dan Toma, Esther Gons and Tendayi Viki, it is a great book, it's currently I would say one of the best books on both Innovation Practice and Innovation Management. So, I would definitely recommend it to everybody. It's a bit thick, but you know, you get actually two books in one. And another one, because to me, both Lean Agile Innovation, you know, they're all means to an end. If they become an end in itself, then that's when they become dogmatic. And what ties them all together is, you know, strategy. And the book I would heartily recommend, it's a, I would say, it's a bit underappreciated, is Game Changing Strategies from Constantinos Markides. It's a great book, so, he's a professor from London Business School, I think, or London School of Economics, I don't know, I keep mixing them. And he writes very well for an academic, you know, it's easy to consume a lot of examples. He makes business model innovation come to life. It's not just some theory, but it's specific examples, and for me, it's great because it shows you how to adapt. It doesn't have a lot of modules or anything, so it's more like looking at it and seeing okay, this worked, this didn't work, what's my case? And the third one, to better thinking. So, one great thing I read was that employees can make a bad CEO look great, so, employees can make anything work, bad decisions, bad management policies, you know, if they want to, they will make it work. At the same time, employees can also make the best strategies and policies go to nothing if they want to sabotage them. So, the last book is more on, I would say, for managers and leaders, and it's The Halo Effect from Phil Rosenzweig. What he talks about is exactly like what I mentioned with the survivor bias, but he talks about different views. Let's say that the gist of his book is by focusing on, you know, those perfect leaders with their halo, you become blinded, and leaders themselves become blinded, because they get confused, because they think that it is their ingenuity that created the result and not the employees and their skill. And you know, was Steve Jobs, the one who created everything? Ula Ojiaku: No Bruno Pešec: No, he definitely had some things that were good, he had some things that are horrible, but he had great people around him, they didn't come out of nowhere. Obviously, you could say the same for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or all the people that we consider, look at that that person, the halo around them. The risk for every leader and manager is to get deluded by their own success. And it's a lovely short book that will show you all these biases and delusions that can happen. I'll stop here. I think three books are enough. Ula Ojiaku: I've had The Corporate Startup on my reading list, but the other ones, Game Changing Strategy, The Halo Effect definitely have gone onto my reading list now, which is already like this long. So, thanks for sharing those. Now, how can the audience reach you? How can the audience reach you, Bruno, are you online on social media? Bruno Pešec: So, I write a lot about innovation, strategy, experimentation, entrepreneurship, as well. You can find all of that on my website, www.pesec.no. It will be in your show note, as well, so you can find it there. I publish a lot of free resources, templates, sessions like this, webinars, writings, an E-book, etc. So, you can find everything there. I invite everybody who would like to connect on LinkedIn as well, but if you do then then please just drop in “Ula sends me.” Ula Ojiaku: Well, more like “I listened to your episode on the podcast, and I'm reaching out.” Bruno Pešec: Right? They can make it as detailed as they wish. So, keeping it simple, that is where I share everything, and it's open and free. And I'm happy to share. You know, if you heard something in this conversation, please reach out to Ula or reach out to me if you would like any questions or any specific materials or whatever. Ula Ojiaku: Sounds great Bruno, thanks for that. Now, any final words for the audience before we wrap this up? Bruno Pešec: Well, before the audience, for you, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation, very engaging. So thank you for creating this atmosphere and making this a very easy conversation. I believe, I mean, I enjoyed it so much, I would be surprised if the listeners don't take a little bit of our energy and conversationA and to the listeners, I just have one thing. So, you heard today a lot of stuff. There's a lot of great stuff to hear from Ula's other episodes, but the most important thing is start immediately, today, don't wait for the perfect moment. Take just one thing from today, and immediately discuss it tomorrow with the team or yourself, just one thing, it doesn't matter what, just immediately try it out. One step at a time. And, you know, a year from now we will look back and see what an amazing year you had. Don't wait for the perfect moment. Just start. Ula Ojiaku: Fantastic. Well, that's very inspirational, I'm motivated to just go and conquer the world right now. Bruno it's been a pleasure speaking with you and I hope you would want to come back another time for us to have another conversation on this show. So, thank you so much Bruno. Bruno Pešec: Thank you, Ula, would be lovely. Ula Ojiaku: Great! Outro: 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.
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.
PRESENTADORES Instituto Tecnológico de Durango/Departamento de Sistemas y Computación/Tecnológico Nacional de México Curso: Marketing Digital y Analítica Web Miguel Ángel González Flores y Carlos Michel García Compean Profesora: Dora Luz González Bañales (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dora-gonzalezbanales-04790120/) CONTENIDO: 1) ¿Qué es el modelo Business Model Generation? ¿Quién lo desarrolló? ¿De cuantos bloques se compone (mencionar los nombres de los bloques)? 2) ¿Cuáles son los tres bloques más importantes para marketing digital (segmento de clientes, propuesta de valor, relación con el cliente? (explicar en qué consiste cada uno) 3) Como vamos a analizar esta temporada al sector hotelero vamos a comentar las características de cada categoría de los hoteles (https://www.entornoturistico.com/sistema-de-clasificacion-hotelera-en-mexico/)? 4) Se presenta un ejemplo de un hotel utilizando el Business Model Canvas y cuál sería su propuesta de valor, su segmento de clientes y cómo se comunica con el cliente FUENTES: https://www.rdstation.com/es/marketing-digital/ http://www.amara-marketing.com/blog-turismo/casos-de-exito-campanas-de-marketing-para-hoteles https://blog.paxzu.com/caso-de-exito-con-el-marketing-digital https://www.tresce.com/blog/marketing-digital-para-empresas/ https://www.lead-innovation.com/es/blog/qu%C3%A9-es-business-model-canvas Foto de Mikael Blomkvist en Pexels --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/doraglez/message
PRESENTADORES Instituto Tecnológico de Durango/Departamento de Sistemas y Computación/Tecnológico Nacional de México Curso: Marketing Digital y Analítica Web Luis Eduardo Ortega Nevarez (https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-eduardo-ortega-nevarez-036120223) y Fernando Alonso Velázquez Torres Profesora: Dora Luz González Bañales (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dora-gonzalezbanales-04790120/) CONTENIDO: 1) ¿Qué es un buyer persona? ¿Para qué sirve un buyer persona? 2) ¿Cómo se relaciona el Buyer persona con el segmento de clientes en el modelo de Business Model Generation? 3) ¿Qué tipo de buyer persona puede haber en el sector hotelero (ejemplos tipo de cliente)? 4) ¿Para qué le puede servir a un sector productivo (en este caso sector hotelero) diseñar un buyer persona para sus estrategias de marketing digital? FUENTES: https://www.inboundcycle.com/buyer-persona https://blog.dinterweb.com/buyer-persona-marketing-digital Photo by asman chema from Pexels --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/doraglez/message
Epic Angels is a network of female executives and operators who have built and expanded companies in all parts of the world. Based in Singapore, it's on track to become the largest female-only angel network in Asia. Its focus is early-stage startups in Asia across all verticals. It invests in pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds. As a strong advocate of female leadership, it prefers having at least one woman in the executive team of its pipeline companies. About the speaker: Maaike Doyer is an entrepreneur, educator, and design strategist with a twisted love for numbers. She studied math, had a career in M&A, and in the past decade, she led a global design firm as the CFO / COO. She personally brought the company from Europe to the US where she founded and scaled their offices in San Francisco and New York. Her company produced the famous business model canvas book, Business Model Generation. She has supported hundreds of organizations of all sizes, all industries, and all geographies with their business model strategy. In the end of 2020 she moved to Singapore to learn more about the Asian culture, and launched Epic Angels within a short period of time.
An interview with David Bland. David is a Lean consultant who aims to help you make good business decisions by testing your business ideas and making sure they're worth pursuing. He's doing this through his day job as founder of Precoil, and also as the co-author of "Testing Business Ideas", a desk reference with 44 different experimental techniques you can use to do the same. We talk about a lot, including: The story behind "Testing Business Ideas", the idea behind the visual design, and how it's part of a box set that will make you the ultimate businessperson Whether there's anything he would have change from his book based on his work since, and whether there are any new techniques that people should be considering Some of the preconditions you need to have in your organisation to enable an experimentation culture, and whether this can work at all stages of a company How to tackle the reluctance to experiment with customers, either because they're seen as too important or because the company leadership think they already know what they want The importance of ethical experiments, and making sure you're working with customers & not on them or against them How assumption mapping can help land the idea of risk of desirability, feasibility, viability risks and how this framing can help pierce leaders' reality distortion fields The importance of balancing discovery & delivery and ensuring that discovery & validation is part of the work, not an optional extra And much more! Buy "Testing Business Ideas" "7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas." Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact David If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also check out his work at Precoil.
Business Model You uses the same powerful one-page tool to teach readers how to draw "personal business models," which reveal new ways their skills can be adapted to the changing needs of the marketplace to reveal new, more satisfying, career and life possibilities. Produced by the same team that created Business Model Generation, this book is based on the Business Model Canvas methodology, which has quickly emerged as the world's leading business model description and innovation technique.
"We don't write books, we craft spreads." Dr. Alex Osterwalder and his book co-authors pioneered the landscape, full-color, creative visuals format for simplifying complex business ideas. They consider every page of their books as a user interface, optimizing for simplicity, clarity, and fun. "Visuals don't become lipstick on a pig, they become an essential part of the reader's experience." There's good news and bad news today: the good news, I know you will love what Alex shares about simplifying complexity. The bad news? My track didn't record! So consider this a masterclass of sorts :) More About Alex: Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential innovation experts whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. His company Strategyzer provides online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation. Alex is the co-author of a suite of beautifully designed bestselling books in the Strategyzer Series including Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and his latest, High-Impact Tools for Teams. ❤️ Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review. Free Time is listener-supported—consider donating to become a podcast BFF and you'll get access to a monthly Q&A call with Jenny and private feed.
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 top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Alex is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual tools. 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. And they really introduced into the strategy dialogue the idea that business models can be intentionally—and creatively—designed. Strategyzer, Alex's company, is on a mission to evolve large established companies so that they inspire and activate and liberate their employees to be innovators. They do this using online courses, applications, and technology-enabled platforms. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the recently launched High-Impact Tools for Teams.In this podcast he shares: Why innovation MUST begin with your culture Why if there were only ONE metric you should be tracking to unleash innovation, it should be your “innovation kill rate” Real-world examples of large enterprises who have been able to transform into agile, innovate organizations, proving it CAN be done __________________________________________________________________________________________"So there are now those outliers who have done exactly that. They invested in innovation, but it's not just the money, they gave innovation power and they created this ecosystem for exploration, with tons of failures. They hold up their failures—same thing as Amazon. They hold up their failures and say, "You can't succeed without failures, and the bigger you get, the bigger your failures. But you know that's the system you need to create for the winners to emerge. So, failure's never the goal, but it's an inevitable side consequence of exploration."-Alex Osterwalder__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Alex Osterwalder + The topic of today's episode2:05—What is your definition of strategy?3:01—What got you interested in strategy?4:01—Could you explain a "dual culture"?5:50—What are the drivers of culture?8:09—What are you most well-known for?11:16—What should a CEO be encouraging to engage innovative behavior?14:30—What is the key lesson people should take away from the case studies you've described?16:20—What do most companies get wrong?18:07—What's a belief that you've changed your mind about?19:54—What are you working on now, and how can people engage with you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Personal website: https://www.alexosterwalder.com/Strategyzer Website: https://www.strategyzer.com/
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 top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Alex is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual tools. 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. And they really introduced into the strategy dialogue the idea that business models can be intentionally—and creatively—designed. Strategyzer, Alex's company, is on a mission to evolve large established companies so that they inspire and activate and liberate their employees to be innovators. They do this using online courses, applications, and technology-enabled platforms. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the recently launched High-Impact Tools for Teams.In this podcast he shares: Why innovation MUST begin with your culture Why if there were only ONE metric you should be tracking to unleash innovation, it should be your “innovation kill rate” Real-world examples of large enterprises who have been able to transform into agile, innovate organizations, proving it CAN be done __________________________________________________________________________________________"So there are now those outliers who have done exactly that. They invested in innovation, but it's not just the money, they gave innovation power and they created this ecosystem for exploration, with tons of failures. They hold up their failures—same thing as Amazon. They hold up their failures and say, "You can't succeed without failures, and the bigger you get, the bigger your failures. But you know that's the system you need to create for the winners to emerge. So, failure's never the goal, but it's an inevitable side consequence of exploration."-Alex Osterwalder__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Alex Osterwalder + The topic of today's episode2:05—What is your definition of strategy?3:01—What got you interested in strategy?4:01—Could you explain a "dual culture"?5:50—What are the drivers of culture?8:09—What are you most well-known for?11:16—What should a CEO be encouraging to engage innovative behavior?14:30—What is the key lesson people should take away from the case studies you've described?16:20—What do most companies get wrong?18:07—What's a belief that you've changed your mind about?19:54—What are you working on now, and how can people engage with you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Personal website: https://www.alexosterwalder.com/Strategyzer Website: https://www.strategyzer.com/
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In today's episode with Elias Völker, Director International and Indirect Sales at tribe29 you will learn1. How to grow your company with an open-source product 2. How to convert open-source product users to paying customers3. Which growth opportunities tribe29 tested, which ones proved efficient About EliasElias is an experienced professional with a strong track record of value-creating projects in large and mid-sized companies in the technology, telecom and media industries such as goetzpartners and tyntec. As Director International and Indirect Sales at tribe29, his focus lies on supporting simple to most complex environments with best-in-class infrastructure & application monitoring and to keep them up and running. He is an avid triathlete and enjoys mountain climbing and photography.About tribe29tribe29 is the developer company of Checkmk - an all-in-one IT monitoring software for hybrid and on-prem infrastructures available in both open source and commercial versions. Checkmk enables monitoring of servers, applications, networks, storage systems, databases, and cloud and container environments to ensure that the entire IT-backbone never fails. tribe29 was founded in 2009 and is based in Munich, Germany. Today, the company operates internationally in 35 countries and serves 2500+ commercial and 10,000+ open source customers.About the host SammySammy is Managing Partner and founder of SAWOO. SAWOO helps companies with Social Marketing and Lead Generation to leverage the power of LinkedIn in a sustainable way. No spam, no bots but building real Human 2 Human connections between you and your B2B buyers. Shownotes EliasFind Elias on LinkedInElias' company tribe29Elias' favorite Business book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and Business Model Generation by Alexander OsterwalderElias' favorite business leader: ElonMusk and Alfred Herrhausen (check out his biography)Sammy's book tip for your hiring process: Who: The A method for hiring by Geoff Smart
Visit www.agileinnovationleaders.com for the full episode shownotes (including interview transcript and bonus resources - free chapter of Where to Play and Navigator worksheets). Guest Bio: Dr. Marc Gruber is full professor at the College of Management of Technology at EPFL where he holds the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization (ENTC) and was Vice President for Innovation at EPFL in the 2017-2021 presidency period. Marc also acted as Associate (2013-2016) and as Deputy Editor (2017-2020) at the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), the highest ranked empirical research journal in the management domain. Furthermore, Marc is co-author of the book “Where to Play: 3 Steps for Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities”, which introduces the Market Opportunity Navigator – a practical business tool that was recently added to the ‘Lean Startup' toolset by Steve Blank and is used by tens of thousands of startups and established firms to improve their capabilities in opportunity identification and new wealth creation. Marc Gruber joined EPFL in the fall of 2005 coming from the Munich School of Management, University of Munich (LMU), where he held the position as vice-director of the Institute of Innovation Research, Technology Management and Entrepreneurship (INNOtec) and established the LMU's Center for Entrepreneurship. He has held several visiting scholar posts at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he conducts research on technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. He is also a visiting professor at the Business School of Imperial College, London. Marc has published his research on innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship in several leading journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, and the Journal of Business Venturing. In an independent research study on the most impactful entrepreneurship scholars (Gupta et al., 2016), Marc was ranked as the worldwide #1 researcher in entrepreneurship for the 2005-2015 period (shared #1 spot), and among the worldwide top 5 for the 2000-2015 period. Beyond his research work, he is currently authoring a textbook on technology commercialization and was the co-editor of a textbook on entrepreneurship as well as a regular contributor to a weekly column on entrepreneurship in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. Marc Gruber received a doctorate from the University of St. Gallen (UNISG) in 2000. In spring 2005, he received a venia legendi from the Munich School of Management (LMU) for his habilitation thesis on marketing in new ventures. Websites/ Resource URLs Where to Play website: https://wheretoplay.co/ Download WhereToPlay_Part1_Sample Chapter pdf here Download Navigator and Worksheets here Steve Blank's Blog on Flyability https://steveblank.com/2019/05/07/how-to-stop-playing-target-market-roulette-a-new-addition-to-the-lean-toolset/ Steve Blank's Blog on the Market Opportunity Navigator https://steveblank.com/2020/06/23/winners-rising-out-of-the-crisis-where-to-find-new-markets-and-customers/ Scott Shane's article on Prior Knowledge and the Discovery of Entrepreneurial Opportunities https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.11.4.448.14602 MIT articles on commercializing 3D printing: http://meche.mit.edu/news-media/new-era-3d-printing https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/innovation-lessons-from-3-d-printing/ Marc Gruber contact/ social media: Email: mark.gruber@epfl.ch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbgruber/ Twitter: @MarcBGruber Books/ Resources: Where to Play: 3 Steps to Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities by Marc Gruber and Sharon Tal Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step by Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business by Rita Gunther McGrath The Theory of the Growth of the Firm by Edith Penrose The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty by Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan Related podcast episodes Steve Blank (Episode 1): http://podcast.agileinnovationleaders.com/website/1-steve-blank-on-the-need-for-innovation-showing-up-and-learning-from-failure Alex Osterwalder (Episode 3): http://podcast.agileinnovationleaders.com/website/s1e003-alex-osterwalder-on-the-3-characteristics-of-invincible-companies-and-how-he-stays-grounded-as-a-leader Sharon Tal (Episode 6): http://podcast.agileinnovationleaders.com/website/s1e005-sharon-tal-on-how-to-identify-the-best-market-opportunities-for-your-ideas-or-innovations-in-a-structured-way Interview Transcript Ula: 00:26 Hi everyone. My guest today is Dr Marc Gruber. He is a full professor at the College of Management of Technology at EPFL (a Science & Technology Higher Education Institution located in Switzerland). Marc is also the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialisation at EPFL and amongst his numerous other achievements, he co-authored the book Where to Play: 3 Steps for Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities with Dr Sharon Tal. This episode complements the conversation I'd had with Sharon in Episode 6. This time around, Marc shares his side of the story behind the book. He also explains how the Market Opportunity Navigator fits in with other Lean Start Up tools like the Business Model Canvas, Customer Discovery & Development, etc. With no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Marc Gruber. Enjoy! Ula: 01:35 Dr Marc Gruber, thank you so much for joining me on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Marc Gruber: 01:41 Thank you very much for inviting me Ula. It is a pleasure to be here. Ula: 01:45 So, let's get started. Marc, I understand that you love art, can you tell me more about that? Marc Gruber: 01:52 I'm a very visual person. That's why I think early on, I developed this love for art. You know, I like to go to museums, galleries, etc. and I think it inspired my research work, how I write, but also the tools that I develop for managers, for entrepreneurs… Because it should be visual. It should be appealing. This is an interesting combination, because it combined somehow your love for the artistic, but also your research, you are typically very scientific, you are very rigorous and structured. And I think combining both worlds, it's actually quite an exciting journey. Ula: 02:26 Hmmm… Now, that's interesting. So, can you give me an example where your love for art has inspired your research work? Marc Gruber: 02:35 Well, I … it's less that it would inspire my research work in the sense that I have a concrete research question based on it. But it's more like, whenever I write, you know, write a paper or article, I think I have this… it can be a nice paragraph. But I know that I could always improve on that. It's more like a feeling that I have, that I think that there's an artistic quality towards writing research papers, that's where I see a lot of parallels. Because it's, in some sense, I when I write and there's a mistake, or there's something not so nice in the paragraph, I somehow view it, I see it, that's the link where art comes in… it can be improved. And same with music, you can hear if there's something that can be improved. Ula: 03:16 Now, that's an interesting analogy. I've also heard Steve Blank, say entrepreneurs are artists, and a good artist knows that the first instance of their work can never be the last one, there's always iterations. Marc Gruber: 03:31 Exactly. And I think that's when you write a nice research paper, or write any book or develop a tool, it should be the same type of instinct. You want to improve on it. You want to … not only do your best, but it has some intrinsic quality that you're trying to achieve that satisfies you. Ula: 03:49 Interesting, so do you paint also? Marc Gruber: 03:52 Yeah, I should make more time for it. There's no time now. I'm more of a passive art lover nowadays. When I go to conferences to give speeches, I like to go to the museums and galleries and check out the new artists, the established ones. You know, so it's, this is kind of nice because once in a while you see a nice piece, and then you acquire it and then, it travels with you for life, because you have it. Being one of these people, I like to collect these things, I would never sell them. Ula: 04:22 Who's your favorite artist? Marc Gruber: 04:24 My favorite one is Gerhard Richter from Germany. He's now 86 or so, he's a very accomplished person. He's one of the few who have truly shaped three, four different styles in art - coming up with them, you know. So you had Picasso with his different periods, but Richter has his very abstract art, and some photorealistic art, and so on. So, you really shape three, four different types of art movements in that sense. And that's quite impressive, because most artists are happy and satisfied if they can do one thing, you know, one type of trademark art, and he has done multiple. That's quite unique. Then you try to, as someone who likes art, try to understand what's the intrinsic quality that cuts across all of them. Ula: 05:05 So, the feeling of knowing when something is finished, is it like a satisfaction or a sense of pride… is something you can describe with words? Marc Gruber: 05:14 It's difficult to describe with words, but definitely, it's satisfaction - you like it. It matches your own aspirations. And you know it deep down and then you become immune to what reviewers would say. So you think, ‘Ok, I've done the work that I enjoy'. It doesn't mean that I'm neglecting what the reviewers would say, that's an intellectual stimulus that you get then from the outside. Ula: 05:37 Now moving on to your book, Where to Play: Three Steps for Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities. So, you co-authored this book with Sharon Tal. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind this book? Marc Gruber: 05:53 This book goes back… my research work… to about 2001 or 2002, when I started teaching that was back then at the University of Munich, about this early stage in entrepreneurship. And I had entrepreneurs in front of me who always struggled to figure out, not doing the prototypes, etc. They struggled to figure out for whom to do the prototypes, what is a good market to play in. And drive it in multiple ways number one to understand which market domains are out there for them, and which they could address in seconds and which one is might or may not be such a good one. And this is a very interesting process that relies a lot on creativity etc. And we'll probably talk about this later on. But there was a paper by a very famous entrepreneurship researcher called Scott Shane. He studied 3D printing from MIT, how it was commercialized - as shown very nicely in his paper - that this technology, this innovation was commercialized by a couple of different people. But all of them basically applied it to the industrial domain, they knew best. Which basically meant, well, there were some people who applied it, maybe to print architectural models, others applied it to dentistry, etc. What was quite interesting for me was, the question while all of these people identified at least one opportunity, but there were some that were extremely valuable opportunities, some that were not valuable at all. So, in that sense, what I asked (in) my research was, you know, could an entrepreneur who sees more opportunities actually benefit from this choice that that he or she would generate? And this is a question that when you look at it, it's a very fundamental nature to entrepreneurship, because the market you choose shapes, not only the profit potential, the value creation potential, but it chooses, it also shapes the identity, in a way, of the company. So in that sense, I got intrigued by this question. I collected some data, then had the pleasure of having a research day at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, when I met Ian MacMillan, one of the very famous entrepreneurship scholars. It turned out that he grappled with the similar ideas that I had grappled with and I had data to investigate to analyze about these early stages in the entrepreneurial process. And we sat together, discussed it, and we have been working on this topic, as scholars ever since the first few papers came out, then end of 2008. This was a very rewarding journey that took a couple of years, then Sharon, my co-author joined the team, where she did her PhD on the topic, collecting data mainly in Israel. And after she was finished, you know, there were now more than a handful of papers. There were other authors who had started studying this topic, knowing this from the research side, but on the other hand, also seeing that there's a lot of interest by startups, but also then from large companies and understanding this early stage process better. And then Sharon and I said, ‘Okay, let's write a book.' ‘Let's solidify this; let's make sure that others can understand it and get it get access to the information because we cannot answer so many phone calls or write so many emails, always explaining the same thing.' So, in that sense, a book is a convenient tool to multiply yourself. And that's how it (the book) came about. But it happened over 15 years of research that then culminated in an effort to write a book. We initially thought it was three months' effort to write a book, it took us two years. Ula: 09:09 Oh, wow! So, 15 years of effort, of research and it took you about two years to now put together the outcome from the research. Marc Gruber: 09:19 Yeah, we thought you know, we've done the research so we should be able to write it down easily… develop a tool, a business framework around it. But that was the hard part, to write something where know the depth, where know it from the research side, you have seen thousands of cases, and then being true to yourself as a researcher and say, hey, it should be simple but not simplistic. And this is a fine line to walk for any author. Because the tool will be applied when it's simple (and) easy to use, but it also will only be applied if it delivers real value. Everyone can dumb down any question as much as one wants but then it's not useful anymore. Finding that fine line between having a simple tool but that is still useful, valuable. So, it took some time to iterate, develop different visuals, develop different explanations. After all, it I think it turned out nicely. It was just a journey that is common to anyone developing a prototype. So, in that sense, what we did there with the tool is nothing less, nothing more than developing another prototype. If you want to do it, well, it's not like a simple task. Ula: 10:22 I have read the book, it's so easy to read, very simple to understand, but not simplistic, as you've said. Why… it's quite easy to miss the amount of work it takes to make things easy and accessible. Marc Gruber: 10:36 After the fact it always looks (like) it's simple. That's exactly the reaction we want to have; that's what a framework needs to do. It needs to boil down… guide you to the main issues, help you ask the right questions and give you good answers. Great admiration for everything Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur did with the Business Model Canvas book, because that's a fantastic book to really enjoy. Ula: 10:58 I have read that, yes. Could you tell us a bit more about the Market Opportunity Navigator? Because that seems to be the centerpiece of the book Where to Play. Marc Gruber: 11:09 So, the book is called Where to Play as you say. It addresses this very fundamental question, ‘Which market domain should I enter?' This is a question, if you break it down analytically, you can say, ‘Hey I first want to understand (the) playground, you know, my opportunity landscape. It's not straightforward to figure this out. Some people might think oh, I can only play in one domain but I am yet to meet an entrepreneur who actually is trapped in one domain only. Normally entrepreneurs can play in multiple domains using their competencies. Let me give you a simple example. It's a drone company out of Lausanne (Switzerland), Flyability - that Steve Blank also featured in his blog post about the book. This drone company that has created a drone in a cage, of course for such a company, they were inspired by market needs in the nuclear energy domain, but then realized there might be better market domains out there. And they did it early enough to avoid any costly pivots. Oftentimes, companies realize that only after a couple of months, maybe even years that the market domain that they had originally identified is not as performant as it could or should be. Then they need to pivot. We wondered - with our practical work with startups, with innovators and established firms - how to make this process a bit more philosophical. This doesn't mean you have a crystal ball and exactly know what the future will bring; this is not at all the idea. Quite to the contrary, in innovation, we all know that you cannot predict the future. But what is particular is that you can also already in advance, try to understand some basic features of your markets. You know, some are highly congested, some are not, some are growth markets, some are shrinking markets, etc., etc. So, there are parameters where you can say, ‘I can make an informed choice.' Second, what you can do by having this from a bird's eye view is to bake agility into the DNA of your staff. Just think about the brand name you're gonna choose. If you have a company that is doing drones, you know, this company in Lausanne that I was talking about called itself Flyability. With this name, you basically can enter any type of domain. They could also have called themselves Drones for the Inspection of Nuclear Energy Plants. This would lock them in even more into this domain and would make a pivot even harder if it should become necessary. So, in short, what we want to do with the method is to provide you with a tool to figure out what are your potential domains out there, your opportunities. And second, provide a tool that allows you to become a more agile star. And both together I think, are a winning combination that allows you to navigate this difficult and uncertain process of startup creation, of early stage innovation. Ula: 13:47 Thanks a lot Marc for that. In your book, you summarized the Market Opportunity Navigator framework as consisting of three steps. Could you let the audience know what these three steps are please? Marc Gruber: 14:02 With pleasure! The Market Opportunity Navigator has a main dashboard which depicts the three steps. The first step is the opportunity bag, you know, it's a little bag where you collect all the opportunities that you identified. The second step consists of a matrix that allows you to evaluate the attractiveness matrix. And the third step is to enter a focus, could we say, hey, that's where I focus and these could be good plan B's, in case my plan A doesn't work out or a good growth option in case my plan A works out. These three steps are depicted on the main navigator board, but behind each step is a worksheet that helps you to walk through these questions and address the main question. So, the first worksheet is dedicated towards helping you understand the different playgrounds you have, you know, the different opportunities that exist for you. It creates, therefore, the opportunity landscape. The underlying idea is that you delink your existing competencies from a concrete application. You know, also in the case of this drone company, they should think about the drones, the capabilities, the competencies they have in their own right without really linking it to any domain. And then have a creative brainstorming session internally and externally with external people to understand what is really the scope of my activities. And this is the first worksheet that helps you to figure out the opportunity landscape. The second worksheet is a worksheet that helps you to evaluate these options that you identified. This is a worksheet that builds on 50 years of venture capital research. Most of your listeners will probably be familiar with the venture capital domain and know that one of the core tasks of a venture capitalist is to understand the prospect of an early stage venture. Venture capitalists have developed a rich set of tools basically to analyze the attractiveness of potential ventures that are presented to them. And we drew on 50 years of research in this domain, and this was really hard work to bring them together into factors that shape the attractiveness, and factors that shape the challenge level in ranking an opportunity, which will combine to provide you with an assessment of how good or not so good these opportunities are. Again, under uncertainty which means while you'll need to maybe adjust your information over time etc. (because these are six factors in total), it had to give entrepreneurs and innovators a more complete view of the factors that matter. Because you might have realized that yourself when you talk to the entrepreneurs, they always excited about the opportunities they're pursuing. Usually they focus on one dimension, you know, think about market size, ‘Wow, that's a big market - that's great!' … or competitive advantage, ‘Hey, we are ahead of the competition. That's great!' But normally what they don't have (is) a pluralistic view of all the key challenges that could hinder the development - time to first revenue, which is a key metric, as entrepreneurship has shown and how long it takes to make these sales, how difficult it is to make the sales, how big (the sales are), and so on. So, you have a couple of metrics that in combination are giving you a more rounded picture of how good or not so good the opportunity is. And if you do this, not only for one opportunity, but for multiple ones, you will quickly realize that not all opportunities are alike. You know, some are high growth, some are low growth, some are highly congested, some are not so congested. With some you have a high margin, with some you have a low margin. And in combination, you have the matrix, which is then the second step in the (Market Opportunity) Navigator that allows you to assess each opportunity, but also the portfolio that you have. The third step is then building on this one, where you can say, ‘Now that I've seen multiple opportunities, (I) have a portfolio in my hands, what should I actually do?' And there, the tool is non-prescriptive, you choose what you want to do, you know, we have in the matrix, the gold mines - low challenge level, high potential; we have moonshots which have a high potential, high challenge, we have the questionables - which have high challenge but low potential; and the quick wins - which have low potential, but also have low challenge level. So, you might want to say, ‘I'll start with the gold mine' or you might want to say, ‘I feel I am the next Elon Musk, I want to change stuff with a moonshot.' Others might say, ‘You know, I'll start with a quick win and use this to develop another opportunity; I'll earn money quickly but then I'll use the proceeds to do something bigger.' And still others might say, ‘Hey, I love this other domain so much. It's a questionable (domain) but, there's another dimension of pleasure that I get out of this.' So we're not prescriptive, but what we say is, ‘Look, you pick your favorite opportunity', but what we advise you to do is to say, ‘Hey, there might be a second opportunity, a third one that is closely related, so that you have growth options that you can efficiently exploit over time.' Or you have - if the first opportunity doesn't work out - you have a good plan B. That's actually quite an interesting concept. It's not something where you invest a lot of time, but in case things go sour, don't materialize, with your first choice… you know, you want to have a pivot that is not as painful as it could be. If you have to pivot, you want to have one that doesn't consume all your energy, your resources, your time or financial resources. Pivoting could be easier, if you have good foresight. Ula: 19:08 I like the illustration in your book, that's around having a backup plan that would help with a seamless pivot where required when you showed two mountains, and there was a bridge. It's kind of you know, depicted that when you have all these details, and you know what your backup plan is, you also would be working consciously to make sure the infrastructure is there, and you are not starting from ground zero again, if you need to pivot. Marc Gruber: 19:35 You can make it more flexible. Look at this drone example I gave you two minutes ago. This is something where you can say, ‘I know that the drone can be applied to inspecting bridges as much as it can be applied to inspecting silos, farm equipment, etc.' What you do is to build a drone that is going to be more flexibly adjusted. And this is like picking a great brand name that you can choose to use for these different domains. As much as that takes initially with a little bit of foresight, some agility into your venture that can make a big difference. When we talk to venture capitalists, they said, ‘Okay, this is a great tool, we wish every startup would come up with a Market Opportunity Navigator to (show) us, because it can clearly tell us that they have figured out what an attractive market is.' ‘They know what they do, they know what they don't want to do. They know what their plan B could be and they know that they are not a one trick pony that can only grow in this domain, but can grow in other domains.' This is creating an exciting value creation journey for the startup but also for the venture capitalists. Also, when you think about it, the little force that you can give to the entrepreneurial venture that is affordable under conditions of uncertainty, this little foresight that can get you a long way. Ula: 20:43 It could be the difference between success or massive failure really. Marc Gruber: 20:48 Absolutely, you know, I'm still yet to meet the first startup that really said, ‘I enjoyed pivoting.' This is often a task that creates not only financial inefficiencies, but a lot of worry in the team. You know, one of the founders firmly believed in a domain and that turns out to be not so great and the need for (a) pivot arises. It's also loss of status maybe within the team; there are quarrels, there are fights, there are redirections. This is not a pleasant period and if you can make this at least smoother by baking this agility as I called it into the DNA of your venture, a lot is gained. And if you maybe can avoid, like on average, not every startup, but on average, a significant number of startup can avoid pivoting then I think the process is also one where that is more rewarding. Ula: 21:38 You have explained the first two steps: searching broadly assessing deeply. And this all leads to the Agile Focus Dartboard. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Marc Gruber: 21:52 Yeah. So, you can picture in your head a dartboard actually with three layers… You have the focal element - that's the opportunity to focus on. And we are big supporters of the idea that you should focus on an opportunity, especially in your startup. When you have three, four people, it's nonsense that you chase too many balloons; you focus on one, but you keep others open as a secondary. Say, ‘Hey, I passively observe, I read newspaper reports maybe once in a while. So, I have a passive knowledge about these markets and keep myself current, because I realise that these might be interesting, additional options for me.' And then we have the third (outer) ring, which we call the storage where you say, ‘Look, there are some opportunities we studied, and they don't work out for us. So, we put these ideas away.' And this is actually more helpful than one might initially think. Because when I talk to entrepreneurs about this third step, they say, ‘Hey, look, this putting away is as valuable for us as the focus, because it helps you to keep what you might want to call mental hygiene. You have so many things constantly to address, to worry about in your venture, (so) if you can put something away, that's actually a relief. And that's why this third ring is actually much helpful to entrepreneurs. With the tools, you come from something unstructured, creative where you have a lot of opportunities, lots of options to something where you have evaluated them to a third step where you say, ‘Hey, that's where I should focus.' And that's then the focal point where, and I'm sure we talk about other tools later on, like a business model canvas, customer development, customer discovery, minimum viable product. We would say, ‘Hey let's learn with additional tools, whether this market domain that I selected is actually a good one.' So big picture of the tool is providing you with some kind of meta learning. You say, ‘Okay, that's what my company could potentially do.' I create (enable) agility. Now, let's learn about the ‘how to play' - the business model that works in your domain; the ideal prototype that you could develop for your target customers. So, the ‘where to play' and the ‘how to play' then form, the yin and the yang, if you want to call it that way. Ula: 23:57 You've nicely segued into the next question I have, which is about other business tools that the Market Opportunity Navigator can be used with? Can you go into more details on this, please? Marc Gruber: 24:10 So, when we designed the tool, we actually were careful in saying, ‘Hey, we know that there is a unique aspect to it that none of the other tools addresses. Let's design it in a way that's plug and play with the existing tools - so, it's non redundant. And actually, when we discussed with Steve Blank, he loved the idea so much that he'd said, ‘Okay, I'm gonna write a blog post about it, and integrate your (Market Opportunity Navigator) tool into my Lean toolset because it's missing some additional valuable learning that is critical for entrepreneurs and innovators.' So, it's non redundant with the other tools, but it forms a more complete tool, and therefore delivers value for the question but delivers that additional value to the other tools and vice versa. There's a nice blog post by Steve Blank called Stop Playing Target Market Roulette; a New Addition to the Lean Toolset. Ula: 24:56 Yes, I've read that. Marc Gruber: 24:57 Wonderful blog post, and it teaches this Flyability drone example, if you want to look at it. Ula: 25:02 We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Marc Gruber: 25:04 And there he explained actually how the tools work together. If you think big picture, you can say, well, the market opportunity navigator helps you to understand where to play, what is a good starting position for your venture. And then you would say, ‘Hey, for this starting position, for this domain, I now try to develop a business model that is appealing. And in order to develop a good business model, I need to figure out product-market fit.' So, I do customer discovery, I do a minimum viable product - we all know Osterwalder/ Pigneur's Business Model Canvas, you know. Steve Blank's tools about minimum viable product, customer discovery... Ula: 25:37 The Lean Startup… Marc Gruber: 25:39 …Exactly! The Lean method that is then extended and say okay, there's another layer to the lean that method. That's how he features it in the blog. So, what you have is basically, a nice suite of business tools that work nicely in conjunction. Each one adds value to the other one. And that's why I like to use them in my own classroom and my work with startups or with large enterprises. I like to apply them as a suite of tools because then people understand the logic behind each of them, but also get much more utility out of them if they combine them. Ula: 26:12 Hmm. So, it sounds like you know, the Market Opportunity Navigator gives you a view at a higher level, a macro level. And then once you've gotten those details and you've narrowed down on where to play, you can now drill down into you know, developing the business model canvas and testing your hypothesis using the Lean Startup method. Marc Gruber: 26:34 If you look at the Lean Startup tools, Business Model Canvas, as well… they don't really tell you where to play, you know, they assume that you have a market. Also, if you look at design thinking, you know, it's an important method nowadays and (needed) in the toolbox of any innovation manager, but it assumes you have a target market that is useful to investigate, to spend time before doing design thinking. But the question is, might there be a better target market out there where it's even more valuable to apply design thinking that is not addressed. Also, the Market Opportunity Navigator helps to address the question therefore, makes the design thinking method for that business model canvas all the other tools we have talked about, more valuable because it's more promising to do (use) them. Ula: 27:18 Do you so far, the focus of the conversation has been on how this market opportunity navigator framework is useful for startups? Can large organizations get some use out of it as well, if so, how? Marc Gruber: 27:33 That's a very good question. The book is written mainly from the perspective of startups. If you apply it to established companies, you know, I've done that multiple times now in workshops, this can be applied extremely smoothly. Established companies typically use the other tools. For the established companies, the where to play question is extremely important nowadays, because you know, you have all the new technologies that provide new competencies. And with the tool… I'll give you a very concrete example. You know, an established watchmaker can understand that when by putting sensors into the competence set, they could actually become a medical device company. Because they say, oh, we now have a watch that can measure your blood pressure, that can measure maybe your sugar level for diabetes, whatever it is, you know, and that's a where to play question. And technology enables so many new uses; AI, put AI into your established products, and you can become a different animal as a company. When you look closely what the very successful Silicon Valley companies are doing, they are not bound by their initial turf. A prime example is Uber. Uber moves wherever it can grow. Uber moves, wherever it can grow based on competencies, you know, and acquires new ones on the way to make the opportunity space even larger. I think we are living in an exciting time because technology enables so much that you can become as a company, a very different animal, that doesn't mean that you have to lose your first initial market domain. But it means you play in additional markets. And Rita McGrath, my colleague from Columbia Business School, she's very nicely depicted this in her book, The End of Competitive Advantage, where she says, look, we used to live in a world dominated by industry, we're actually nowadays living in competing arenas. That means, you know, wherever firms move, wherever they can grow, their measure of success is the share of the potential opportunity space. But that's a fluffy concept. What is an opportunity space? What's the share, you can get out of this one? That's a very pertinent question. And the virtual playbook gives you basically, the tool that helps you to understand what's your opportunity space, this doesn't fall out of heaven for the companies. If Apple moves into car manufacturing, this is an entrepreneurial step where they say, ‘okay, that's an opportunity that we identified'. Among many opportunities that they identified that this is one that they've deemed worthwhile to get into. And then there's managerial questions about how to exploit this opportunity to hire away people from Daimler, partner up with Fiat… whatever, you know, those steps are to explore this opportunity. But initially, there's the where to play question for Apple, for Uber, for Google, for any type of company, out there, and you can close your eyes to that and say, hey, we are only in our home turf, but then others might have set their sights on your home turf. Now think about what happened to the cellphone manufacturers, you know, they were attacked, they didn't die, because the second one, Ericsson took over Motorola and became bigger than Nokia. Now, it was the computer manufacturers who said, hey, we can play in the cellphone domain. And see, and that's where this arena concept is extremely pertinent. And therefore, tools that help you to understand what your competitive arena is - where to play - become important. That's where the book becomes important. What usually larger or more resource rich firms can do is to not only exploit one opportunity, but they can do multiple ones. So, the third step is one where they can focus on a handful, maybe a dozen opportunities in parallel, create an interesting pipeline. But even then, when I talk to the large companies, they don't want to waste money. They want to understand where they could play and what could be a good plan B if my first option doesn't work out. Ula: 31:10 They also want to be lean and agile. Marc Gruber: 31:13 If you can achieve a higher innovation outcome … strong innovation outcome, with less effort, with less resource consumption, of course, that's a winning formula. Ula: 31:25 Hmm. That's true. Do you then have any other books in the pipeline, will there be a sequel to Where to Play? Marc Gruber: 31:34 At the moment is no sequel plan because the book has been out for two years. When you look at how long it takes until books are known to people, understand and apply them… It takes some time until a tool actually is diffusing into the market. And a good example is Steve Blank's books. They were extremely successful, but it also didn't come from Sunday to Monday. But it took some time until people heard about them, saw them, saw the usefulness, they create a following. And then the same happened with Osterwalder and Pigneur's initial book, which was the Business Model Generation book, which took several years until it hit mainstream. That's why the Where to Play is a book, which was launched, people adopted it, it got translated into multiple languages, Steve Blank featured it as a part of the Lean Startup toolset in May last year. So, I think the journey is still on the early side. And so, I prefer setting my sights on helping others to apply it, understand its value, because I firmly believe in the value and how it can help people become more successful entrepreneurs and innovators. Maybe, at some point I'd say it's time for a second one. But you know, not yet, not quite yet. Ula: 32:42 No problem at all! Right!! So, are you a reader? Would you say you like reading? Marc Gruber: 32:47 I love reading. I like reading and I actually can read quite quickly - that's the benefit. But some of the stuff you don't want to read quickly and that's the annoying part, because then you don't have the time to read it slowly. Ula: 32:57 What would you say, are your two favorite books and why? Marc Gruber: 33:02 There is a book from 1959 from Edith Penrose. She's one of the eminent academic scholars. She has written a book called The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. This is an extremely insightful book in the sense that many of the things we're discussing nowadays are actually foreshadowed by her, half a century earlier. And it's a very nicely written book, it basically says, ‘Look, if you want to understand the growth of firms, you just have to look at the imaginative power of its C-suite and that is a function of their education and experience in print.' And it's just one element of the book, which makes it exciting because it foreshadows a lot of the diversification literature we see; the growth literature that we see nowadays. And it has very powerful patterns of explanation that help you to understand why some firms are growing very strongly, while other firms might be very constrained in how they think about what they could do. Ultimately brings it down to a very intriguing level of understanding because it connects the cognitive element to the resource base of a company. So, I recommend that definitely to everyone. Another one that I like a lot is The Entrepreneurial Mindset by Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan. This came out in 2000. And it's one of those books that combines a lot of entrepreneur insights. It's based on a couple of HBR (Harvard Business Review) papers that MacMillan and McGrath had authored in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. They put them all together in this book with a lot of added new content, and a lot of new theorization, examples, etc. So it's one of those books, you read it and say that was a milestone, too, when you read the book by Steve Blank and by Alex Osterwalder, from Eric Ries, the more recent one, but you begin to understand the intellectual roots that each and every book has the heritage of the thoughts, how the fields developed, how we nowadays think about stuff, but also where it has its roots maybe 20, 30 years ago, or in Penrose's case, more than half a century ago. Ula: 35:04 It is interesting, because you find out that there are connections and no field kind of suddenly springs up on its own, there are connections. Marc Gruber: 35:13 Yeah, that's it. If someone has a bit of reading time over the next few weeks, months, over the summer on the beach - this is definitely a set of books that you can take with you and you understand management and entrepreneurship, innovation management, in their very fundamental and intriguing manner. Ula: 35:31 I already have some of the books in my library, I now have some recommendations for new ones. So that's much appreciated. So, given how much you've accomplished over the years, what would be your advice for someone who is starting up and who might aspire to walk the path that you're on currently? Marc Gruber: 35:53 For me, it was important for my own career as a professor to understand where to play. In the sense that I always had more paper opportunities - articles or research opportunities than I could possibly do. So, I basically had my own portfolio of opportunities, and I had to discriminate where I thought this might be a better research question. This might be a more intriguing question than another one. So, I think I applied basically what I early on, you know, in my research what I later on said in the playbook. That's number one. Number two, you can always push harder. If you think your paper is nice, you can make it even nicer. That's like 110% level; you push yourself and try to understand what your limits are. I think that's an interesting aspect to discover within yourself and not to be too satisfied too early. Which makes you grow, basically a recipe for growth, because you say, ‘I push harder, I tried to learn more, I tried to write it even better' and then you push yourself over your own limits. And that's the satisfying part that leads to what I've just said earlier, when you know, I was talking about art and the implications for art. A good artist doesn't give up early, a good artist pushes himself to understand the new frontier. And I think as scientists, we are pushing the frontiers and, you know, in that sense, giving up too early is not a good recipe. You always can do better, because that's the way you learn. And that brings me to my third advice as to being a professor, being an academic. You get paid for pushing the frontier, and then you get even paid for talking about how you push the frontier. So, it's never boring, you know, because you try to push the frontier. It's a wonderful experience to learn more and to say, ‘Okay, I understood something that maybe other people have not yet understood', and or at least from this perspective, have understood, and then you talk about it, and you get feedback. It's a process that keeps you young as well. Ula: 37:46 It's important to enjoy the process as well, don't you think? Marc Gruber: 37:50 Yeah, but don't tell it to my employer because he is paying me for doing this job you know. Ula: 37:56 I wouldn't. Okay, right. So how can the audience reach you Marc? Marc Gruber: 36:27 The audience can email me at marc.gruber@epfl.ch. We have an interesting website that you might want to check out, it's called wheretoplay.co, www.wheretoplay.co. There, you can register for our newsletter. So, we every other month, we update the latest news, latest slides that you can download all this stuff for free. You can get webinars about the method. You can, if you're a trainer, a coach or consultant, you can get the material there for free to apply it in your activities. So, worksheets are in the open domain download. We have basic slides that you can use for teaching the method, for doing your consulting. All of that up on the website, check it out, wheretoplay.co. You just have to register and then all this material is available to you. Ula: 38:50 Oh wow. All for free? Marc Gruber: 38:52 All for free Ula: 38:53 Wow, that's impressive Marc Gruber: 38:56 You know, we're currently also working on an app - so that what I described as a process becomes more of a very playful exercise. Ula: 39:01 That's great. Are you on social media? Marc Gruber: 39:04 All on the usual suspects except for Instagram. Marc B Gruber on Twitter, it's on LinkedIn, on Facebook - you find me with my name. That's about it, you know? Ula: 39:14 Is there anything else you want, the audience to check out, or do? Marc Gruber: 39:19 You know, if people (would) send us emails about how useful it was? If you have the chance to apply (these concepts) please do and let us know your experiences. It's so rewarding for Sharon and myself to just listen to your stories, how it helped you, etc. You know, we get many stories of entrepreneurs saying ‘Oh, we wish would have applied it when we were young…' ‘…We could have avoided some mistakes', you know. Then they still applied and they are a bit progressed in their careers and that's exciting to hear as well. Please share your stories, email us, leave them on the website. We want to hear from you. Ula: 39:55 Great! Well, thank you so much for your time, Marc. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Marc Gruber: 40:02 It's my pleasure entirely. Thank you very much, Ula.
This is the tip of the iceberg. To dive into the details and support the author, order the https://geni.us/model-generation-book (book). Introductionhttps://geni.us/model-generation-book (Business Model Generation) is a guide to the highly influential business model canvas. This canvas was co-created by 470 practitioners from 45 countries. The book features practical innovation techniques used by leading consultants and companies worldwide. It is currently used by P&G, Amazon and Tesla to improve business efficiency. The book features a highly visual, 4-color design that simplifies powerful strategic ideas and tools. Business Model Building Blocks“A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value” - Alexander Osterwalder The foundation of business models should always be what the authors call a Business Model Canvas. This canvas should provide a visual prompt for participants to focus on the crucial criteria. The aim of a business model canvas is to focus the discussion on strategic thinking rather than being distracted by small operational details. The building blocks that form this canvas make it dynamic. This means some options in certain sections will impose limits on or amplify other sections. The authors provide nine different building blocks that every business should incorporate into their business model canvas: Key Partners - You can start to control more market share simply by working together with other businesses. This cooperation can lead to a superior product and better supplier links. Key Activities - Your company will have its own key activities that lead to profit. Value Propositions - These are groups of benefits which incentivize clients to work with you over your competitors. You can improve this category by innovating new products or optimizing them to fit client needs. Customer Relationships: Different industries and customers require different types of assistance. Customer Segments - Try to target specific groups of customers to gain competitive advantage in a few key areas. These groups are called customer segments. Key Resources - These resources can be used to gain a competitive advantage. This includes superior talent or land. Channels - You must develop communication channels other than advertising. Every product must be able to be scrutinized. Cost Structure - Your cost structure will determine your business structure. This is because your cost structure will place constraints on other parts of the business. Revenue Streams - The authors describe the revenue streams as the arteries of the business model. This is because they obtain income but impose certain constraints on operations. Business Model PatternsWhile reviewing your business model building blocks and the model they create you are likely to notice patterns. There will be some patterns unique to your business but there are also five patterns that are extremely common across all business sectors. The authors argue that understanding these patterns will help you to understand the synergy and tradeoffs associated with certain building blocks. Unbundled ModelsThis is where an organization splits three aspects into their own discrete identities. This is most common in businesses where they are actually offering multiple different services, like telephone companies who also offer broadband. Unbundling these services will prevent decisions in one area leading to limitations for the other areas. The authors offer an example of banking to explain the importance of unbundling services: The bank simultaneously advises wealthy clients and sells financial instruments. The former is a long-term business. The bank wants to sell its financial instruments to competing banks for extra revenue. But, this could hurt their competitive position. There is a clash between the advisory division and the product...
043: It was such a pleasure interviewing another great example of collaboration - fully virtual by the way. I am thrilled to introduce this episode with Daniela and Alex to you. Alex is a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. He's currently ranked No. 4 of Thinkers50, the top 50 management thinkers worldwide. He invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map together with Yves Pigneur. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the newest one, High-Impact Tools for Teams. Since August 2018, Swiss Daniela Leutwyler has been a Personal Assistant to Alex Osterwalder. Just a few months earlier, in March 2018, she had started her own business as a Virtual Assistant with the goal of being able to pursue her profession regardless of location in the future. Leutwyler can look back on over 20 years of professional experience as an assistant, most recently for over seven years as Executive Assistant to Marc Walder, CEO Ringier AG. Follow Daniela, Alex and Strategyzer: https://strategyzer.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-leutwyler/ https://twitter.com/alexosterwalder
In this episode, my guest Alex Osterwalder shares 3 common traits you'd expect to find in an invincible company, the back story of how his book Business Model Generation came about from his PhD thesis, how he stays grounded as a leader and much more. You'll need a pen and notepad ready for taking some notes! Bio: 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 top 50 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, The Invincible Company, and the recently-published High-Impact Tools for Teams. Books/ Articles: The Invincible Company: Business Model Strategies From the World's Best Products, Services, and Organizations by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur High-Impact Tools for Teams: 5 Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast by Stefano Mastrogiacomo & Alexander Osterwalder Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation by David J. Bland & Alexander Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur Brain Rules, Updated and Expanded: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina Article: The Culture Map https://www.strategyzer.com/blog/posts/2015/10/13/the-culture-map-a-systematic-intentional-tool-for-designing-great-company-culture Article: Allan Mulally (former President and CEO, Ford Motor Company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mulally Article: Ping An (Banking & Insurance Group/ owner of Medical Platform ‘Good Doctor') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_An_Insurance Alex's website & social media profiles: Website: https://www.strategyzer.com/ Twitter handle: @AlexOsterwalder LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexosterwalder/ Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: [00:28] In this episode we have Dr. Alex Osterwalder. To many, he needs no introduction. He is known for his phenomenal work on developing the Business Model Canvas. He has authored or co-authored a growing library of books including Business Model Generation; Value Proposition Design - How to Create Products and Services Customers Want; Testing Business Ideas, and one of the topics we focused on was his book that was released back in 2020, The Invincible Company. Since then, he has released a new book that's titled, Tools for Teams. I must mention though, that some of the references to concepts like travelling around the world may not be relevant in this current COVID-19 pandemic situation. However, the key principles of entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, innovation, leadership (mentioned in this conversation with Alex), I believe these are still timeless and valid. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, with no further ado, my conversation with Alex Osterwalder. Ula Ojiaku: [01:49] Thank you, Alex, for joining us. It's an honour to have you on the show. Alex Osterwalder: [01:53] My pleasure. Great be here. Ula Ojiaku: [01:55] Great. So, what would you say is your typical day, typical day in the life of Alex? How does it start? Alex Osterwalder: [02:04] It depends. So, you know, there's two typical days, one typical day is when I travel, and one typical day is when I don't travel, so they're very different - if you want. I probably spend about 50% of my time traveling all across the world talking about innovation, growth and transformation strategies. And then, you know, my day is I wake up, and it's “Oh, what country am I in now?”... And just trying to get the best out of the day and talk to people about growth and transformation. When I don't travel, my typical day is mixed between helping grow and manage, Strategyzer, the company I founded, but also spending a lot of time thinking about how, can we really help business leaders, business doers do a better job, right? So, I spend a lot of time thinking, sketching out things, I wouldn't say writing because when my co-authors and I create some content, it's usually more drawing first and writing after. But I'd say a lot of time, spent on pretty fundamental questions. And the rest of that when we're not thinking that we're doing or sharing. So that's the kind of mix - not very concrete maybe. But you know, it's so diverse, it really depends a little bit on the type of day, where I am, what the project is. So - very, very diverse days, I'd say. Ula Ojiaku: [03:22] What do you prefer - traveling or not traveling? Alex Osterwalder: [03:26] I enjoy both, right. So, what's important is after intense days of travel, you know, I just this week, I was in Paris with the CEOs of one of the largest companies in France. I like coming back to Switzerland and going on a hike in the mountains, while thinking about certain topics and digesting some of the things that I've seen. What I really enjoy is being in the field with doers and leaders seeing what they struggle with. But then being able to take the time to digest that and turn that into practical tools and processes that help them do a better job, right. So that mix is what I enjoy. The diversity is exactly what I enjoy. Ula Ojiaku: [04:07] That's great. You mentioned you like hiking, am I right in understanding that when you're not running workshops, or helping doers and businesses would hiking be one of your hobbies? Alex Osterwalder: [04:21] So, I can give you a concrete example, this week, I was traveling at the beginning of the week, and for two days, I had back to back calls for 12 hours with either leaders with my own team. So, tomorrow morning, I'm going to drive to the mountains - from my office, it's about an hour away. During the drive, I take calls so I work on the drive, because I can schedule that in advance. And then I pack out my skis and I put what we call skins on the skis and I walk up the mountain for maybe 90 minutes, take the skins off and ski down for 10 minutes. That's it, right. So, during that kind of hike, it's just kind of airing out the brain. But, you know, I wouldn't say that's just leisure time that's actually thinking and digesting. So, I would think about either the topics of the week when I was in the field with real clients and business people struggling with growth and transformation issues, or thinking of my own team in my own leadership challenges. So, it's work but it's in a different context. Then, what's going to happen tomorrow is I'm gonna jump in the car again and drive back to the office in the afternoon - I work out of my office. So that's how a typical kind of day looks like when I have some time to get out of the building. I do go for a ski tour. But it isn't really disconnecting. It's just thinking in a different environment, and then come back to the office, and maybe sketch something out on the wall or on the whiteboard. Ula Ojiaku: [05:46] It also sounds like you're kind of a visual person. So, you do lots of graphics, I mean, your books, The Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, and Testing Business Ideas - they are very visual and easy to read. Are you a very visual and artistic person? Alex Osterwalder: [06:06] Artistic, I'd not say because my visuals are pretty ugly, but visual 100%. So, I believe if you can't sketch it out, if you can't draw a problem, you probably didn't understand it well enough. Even complex challenges can be simplified down, not to mask the complexity, but actually just to get a handle of it and to think about the most essential things. So, the reason we use visuals in our books is actually less to just make them look pretty. It's because I do believe visuals are a language, a shared language. There are some things you can't describe easily with words. Like how am I going to describe with words my business model portfolio like that makes no sense, or even describing the business model with words doesn't really make sense. Sketching it out very quickly, and then having a paragraph that accompanies that sketch, that works right or even better, when I do presentations, I would build up the visual piece by piece while telling the story. So, I get bored when people say storytelling, and then it's a lot of blah, blah, blah. I like the storytelling with the visual message. And it's like a good voice over, you know, in a movie, that will go hand in hand. So, I think we don't use visual tools enough in our business practices. In certain circles, it's a tradition. If we take more of the IT field, you don't map out a server infrastructure without using visual tools. But in strategy and transformation, people talk too much, and they draw too little. Visual tools are unbeatable, they're unbeatable. They won't get you to do things completely differently. But they will get you to do things much faster, much clearer, because you have a shared language. So, when you have a shared language to map it out, to capture it, to create a visual artifact, you have better conversations about strategy, about business models, about culture. And that is incredibly important when we talk about these fuzzy topics, right? Or change management, like what the heck does that mean? But when you start visualizing this, we're moving from this state to that state. These are the obstacles; this is how we're going to overcome it. And you make all of that visual and tangible, not too much visuals, because then it's complicated, just the right amount. That is, you know, the magic of visual communication, where you still use words, you still can tell stories, but you just use the right communication tool at the right time. Ula Ojiaku: [08:37] You're saying, ‘…not too much visual, not too many words, just the right amount…' How do you strike the balance? Alex Osterwalder: [08:46] You don't. So, the way you figure out if you're on track or not, is by testing it right? So, let's say I share a slide deck, I can see in people's faces, are they getting it? Are they not getting it? I can listen to their questions. When the questions are really about good details where you can see they understood the essence and now they're going a step further, they got it – right? When people are confused and they ask very fundamental questions of what I just explained. Well, guess what, then the problem is with me, not with them. I made a mistake in the way I told the story. So, I never blame the audience, I always look for the mistake within and say, ‘okay, what should I have done differently?' So, the way you figure out if you struck the right balance, is by continuously testing. And then obviously, over time, if you take visual language, we've gotten pretty good at creating visual books; we know what works, we know what doesn't. The challenge then is when you get good at it, is to not get arrogant. So, you always need to remember, well, you know, maybe the world changed. So, what worked yesterday doesn't work today. So, you go fast, because you know, but you always need to remain humble, because maybe you know something that was right yesterday, not today, you got to be careful. So you go fast, because you know, but you still listen enough to question yourself enough that you figure out, when do you need to change, because a lot of people get famous, and then they believe what they say, believe their own BS, they forget to stay grounded because the world changes, and you need to go with the change. So that's another balance - once you figured it out, you need to make sure time doesn't move faster than you otherwise you become the dinosaur in the room. Ula Ojiaku: [10:26] So how do you keep yourself grounded? Alex Osterwalder: [10:30] Yeah, so it's not always easy, right? So, if I just take our company, it's constantly trying to create a culture where people can speak up. Constantly trying to create a culture where people don't fear critique - design critique. That's not easy, because even though we have a pretty flat hierarchy, when you're the founder, you're the founder. So, people will say ‘yeah, but you know, I'm not gonna tell this guy he's full of BS.' So, you need to create that culture where people dare to [speak up], that's number one. But then number two is just constantly staying curious, right? When you think you figured it out, you probably just know enough to come across, like looking like you figured it out, you know too little for really understanding it. So, I just work on the assumption that I never know enough. You can't know everything. Sometimes you don't need to go further because it's just you're now looking at the 20%. They're going to take too much time. But if you stay curious enough, you'll see the big shifts. If you listen to the weak signals, you'll see the big shift coming and you can surround yourself with people who are a little bit different. The more people are like you, the less you're going to see the shift coming and that's the problem of established companies. They do the same thing day in day out. They don't see what's coming. However, if, for example, you create a portfolio of projects where people can explore outside of your core business, then all of a sudden you see, ‘…wow, they're getting traction with that? I thought that was never going to be a market….' And, ‘they're starting that customer segment – really?' So, you need to create ecosystems that keep you alert. It's very hard again, so I don't trust myself to be able to check my own BS. So, you need to create ecosystems that keep you alert. I think that's the challenge. And you know, maybe my team will say, ‘yeah, Alex, you're talking about these things on a podcast.' But you know, you don't really do that. So, I really have to be careful that that doesn't happen. That's why I admire people who can rise to really, really senior positions, but they stay grounded. One of my favorite examples is Alan Mulally. He turned Ford from a 17 billion loss-making monster into a profitable company. I was really fortunate to get to know him. And he's just grounded, like, a really nice guy. So, it doesn't mean when you have some success, you have to get full of yourself, you just stay grounded, because… we're all just people at the end of the day, right? But it's a challenge, right? It's always a challenge to remind yourself, I knew something now, maybe tomorrow, it's different. I get passionate about this stuff. So, I just go on rambling. Ula Ojiaku: [13:09] You know, I could go on listening to you. I am passionate about it from a learning perspective. Now, let's move on to the next section. I understand that the Business Model Generation, the book, which you wrote in collaboration with Yves Pigneur, I hope I pronounced his name correctly. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. So, it came about as a result of the work you were doing as part of your PhD studies. Could you tell us a bit more about that story? And how, you finally arrived at the Business Model Generation book and the artifacts? Alex Osterwalder: [13:46] Sure, sure. So, in year 2000, I became a PhD student with Yves Pigneur. And he was looking for somebody who could help him with mapping out business models. And the fundamental idea was, can we kind of create some computer aided design system- so, we could build business models, like architects build buildings and computer aided design? That was the fundamental assumption. But in order to make computer systems like that, you need a rigorous approach, right? You need to model, what is a business model can be fuzzy, because otherwise, how are you going to build some kind of system around that? So, in architecture, it's easy. We're talking about structures and about materials. In business, it's a bit harder, what are the structures? What are the materials, what are the building blocks? So that was the starting point. And I did my PhD with him - amazing collaboration. Then I went out into the world and did a couple of things that work to help scale a global not-for-profit, then I had a consulting firm together with a friend. But then ultimately, the business model work I did on my PhD got some traction; people started asking me if I could speak in Colombia, in Mexico. First at the periphery - it was pretty interesting. People started downloading the PhD (thesis), reading it in companies… So, there were a lot of weak signals. And then, when I had enough of those, I asked Yves, ‘hey, let's write this book that we always wanted to write.' So, we embarked on the journey of Business Model Generation. And we thought we can't write a book about business model innovation without doing it. So, we tried to do it in a different way. We did Kickstarter, before Kickstarter existed, we asked people to pay us, you know, because we needed the funding, or I didn't have any money, I just came out of doing not-for-profit work. So, we got people to pay us to help us write the book. And I did workshops around the world. And it was, really fun, entrepreneurial experience. And then we launched it and became a big success. And I think a little bit of the secret was, we built something with that book, or we designed something that we would have wanted to buy, there was no that there was no visual business book, there were visual business books, but not the type we wanted to buy. And turns out, almost 2 million people had the same kind of desire. And with that, we realized the power of visual books, we realized the power of visual tools. And we started digging deeper. And then we made more books, not because the world needs more books, they're enough out there. But we always tried to address the next business challenge we would see; we would try to create a tool. If the tool works, we would create a book around it. That was the Value Proposition Canvas. And we thought, okay, people are doing testing, but they're not really good at it. Let's write another book: Testing Business Ideas. And we did that in collaboration with David Bland. So, we created a library of experiments to help people get more professional. And then you know, we saw okay, large companies, they still can't innovate. Why don't we write a book called The Invincible Company and we give them a tool that helps them to do this in a large established company. So, every time we see a challenge, we try to build the tool and the book around it to help people around the world. So, it's kind of the same. And what's fun is that behind that, behind the books, we build the technology stack to help actually bring those tools into companies. So, you know, Strategyzer doesn't earn, we earn some money from the books, but the core is really building the technology stack. So, the idea that we had in the PhD is now what we're building 20 years later. Ula Ojiaku: [17:21] Oh wow! Now when you mentioned that your company, Strategyzer, builds the technology stack on which the books are based. What do you mean by that? Alex Osterwalder: [17:32] Maybe the easiest way to describe it is that we believe in technology-enabled services. So typically, let's say big company comes to us and says, we want to work on growth and transformation, can you accompany one of our teams. Now, traditionally, a consultancy would just put a number of people on that. And then it's just the people are going to try to solve the problem - they sell hours. We look at it slightly differently. And we say there is a type of challenge that we can productize because it's actually the same challenge all the time, how do we go from idea to validation to scale. So, there are a couple of things there that are actually exactly the same for every single team that needs to go to through that process. And then there's some things that are very domain specific; in Pharma, you will test ideas differently than in Consumer Goods, etc., etc. But we would then start to build the online training and the software platform that would allow us to address that challenge of going from idea to validation to scale, in a lot more structured way, in a lot more technology enabled way. There're things where a human coach adds huge value. And there's things where online learning or a software system will create a lot more value; online collaboration, tracking the data, comparing the data understanding how much have you de-risked your idea so far. I'm sharing that with senior leaders. All of that can be automated. The way I like to compare it is like ERP's in companies like SAP and so changed operations, there are tons of companies out there and today, we have a lot less. But when they changed operations, they did that with software, I think the same is going to happen to strategy and innovation today. That today, we don't use a lot of good software, we use PowerPoint, Word, and maybe Excel, right? That's not good enough. Those are general purpose tools, which create a lot of value. But you shouldn't use those to manage your strategy and innovation, because that's becoming a very dynamic process. When you talk to a big company, a corporation, they have thousands of projects going on at the same time; thousand innovation projects. How do you manage that portfolio? It's more than just typical project management, we're talking innovation project portfolio, so you need to understand different things. That's the kind of infrastructure that we build, not just the software, also the tools and the content, online training, so become scalable, so people can change the way they work. Ula Ojiaku: [20:08] Fascinating. Now, when you talk about the automated part of your tech platform, are you talking about dashboards? Alex Osterwalder: [20:16] Yeah, let me give you a simple example. Right? So, when I'm a team, and I start mapping out my idea, an idea is just an idea, right? Technology, market opportunity… I need to create my Value Proposition Canvas and my Business Model Canvas to give it a little bit more shape. How am I going to capture value from customers? How am I going to capture value for my organization? Right - that you need to sketch out. Okay, you could use a digital tool to do that because then you can share as a team – sort of useful but not breakthrough. But then as a team, when you start to manage your hypothesis, you need to ask yourself, ‘okay, what needs to be true for this idea to work?' You might have 10, 20, 50 hypotheses, you want to start to track those hypotheses. You want to start to track ‘how are you testing those hypotheses? What is the evidence that I've captured?' You need actually whole-knowledge management around the evidence that you've captured in the field. ‘Oh, we did 50 interviews, we have about 30 quotes that confirm that people have a budget for that particular process', right? That is not something you easily manage in a spreadsheet, it gets a mess very quickly; that's at the team level. Now, once you have that data captured, what if you could take that data and automatically create a risk profile so the team knows ‘this is how much we de risk our idea. Oh, we looked at desirability, maybe 10% of desirability, 20% of feasibility. We looked at some viability...' Once you have data, you can manipulate the data in very different ways and understand the challenge better - that's at the team level. Now imagine at the senior level where you have, again, you know, 100, 500, 1,000 teams doing that; you want to understand which team is working on the biggest opportunity. ‘Okay, this one. But yeah, we invested maybe half a million dollars in that team, but they actually didn't de-risk the idea at all.' So, it looks like a great opportunity, but there's no de-risking. So actually, that might just be hot air, right? And you want to be able to do that for a thousand teams. Today, the way we do it is the teams pitch to a manager who pitches to the senior leader. And that's just a mess. So, it's very similar to what I mentioned with ERP. There's a lot of data there, that is hidden in different places - in spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. There's no way to aggregate that. So, guess what? Strategy today and innovation is badly managed - if people are doing it right, that's already another challenge. You know? Ula Ojiaku: [22:45] Okay Alex Osterwalder: [22:46] Today, people are not that good at strategy and innovation. But that's radically changing, because the tasks are getting really big. It's not just about profit, it's also about impact. So, there are a lot of exciting challenges ahead of us, that require a different toolset and different software stack to even be able to do that. Ula Ojiaku: [23:05] Wow. So, do you consider lean innovation important for organizations of all sizes? And if so, why? Why? Why? I know, it's an obvious question. But why do you consider that the case. Alex Osterwalder: [23:20] Very simple and the challenge is different for the startup than for the established company. So, for the startup… So, for both… let's start with what's shared. For both, it's a matter of survival, okay? Now, let me start with the team first. Well, what's the challenge when you're a startup, you don't have any customers, you don't have any revenues, you might have some self-funded or VC funding, you're gonna run out of money. And I think we're in an age where there's too much money. So, for a while you for quite a while, you can live without a business model, we have some great examples, billion-dollar unicorns that have no business model, and they're still alive, because they're just funded by VCs. That is a very rare thing. That's not for everybody. So, at one point, you do need to understand how you create and capture value. So, you want to get as fast as possible, from idea to not just validated business, but actually a company that makes money that captures value, right? Because, you know, yes, it is. You can say, ‘yeah, but the beginning is about users.' That's okay. But users, you know, without revenues, not going to keep you alive for a while, VC funding is not a revenue stream. Let me just make that clear. VC funding is not a revenue stream. Ula Ojiaku: [24:34] They are out for a profit as well. Alex Osterwalder: [24:36] So sometimes young founders confuse that. Yeah, you can focus on funding. But ultimately, the funding needs to allow you to find a profitable and scalable business model. Sometimes people forget that. So that's survival at the startup stage, right? Now, what Lean does, and I'm not sure the word is very well chosen, because Lean comes actually from making things better. But in the startup world, is actually figuring out what's going to work in the first place, you're not making your business model better, you're trying to figure out which one is going to work. So, the testing of your idea is essential to get faster from idea to real business, or, in some cases, to shut it down. Because let's say you take VC money, and you find out, this is not a scalable business, you better give the money back or buy out the VC share, because all they care about is scale. And there's quite a few companies that bought back their shares, Buffer is a very well-known example, because they figured out the business model they're comfortable with, which is not further scaling. Highly profitable… definitely growth, but not the insane kind of growth VC venture capital's looking for. So you get faster from idea to real business with the Lean Startup approach and Customer Development by Steve Blank and Eric Reis, or you get faster to the point where you say, ‘this is not working, I'm going to change, I'm going to stop - not pivot - I'm going to stop.' And then, radical pivot - maybe you start a new startup with a completely different goal. That's for startups. For the established companies, it's a matter of survival for a different reason. Because their business models are dying and expiring. So, most established companies are very good at efficiency innovation; new technologies, digital transformation…, they improve their business model. Now, that is important, and you need to do it. But if you just get better at what you're doing while your business model is dying, you're just going to more efficiently die. So, at the same time, you need to learn how to reinvent yourself. So, it's a matter of survival that you figure out what's tomorrow's business model. And you can't do that without the Lean approach because it's not about making big bets, it's about making a lot of small bets. But here's the nugget that people get wrong. So, they say, ‘yeah, we're gonna do Lean Startup.' So, they have five projects, and they believe that out of those five projects, if we just pivot enough, we're gonna get a multibillion-dollar growth engine. That is delusion at its best. Because, if you look at early stage venture capital, you actually need to invest in at least 250 projects to get one breakthrough success. So, what it means for established companies, if they really want to find the winner, they need to invest in tons of losers. And they're not losers, per se. But some of those projects need to be killed after three months, some of those projects might make 10 million or $100 million in revenues. But only something like one out of 250 will move towards 500 million or a billion. That, is a matter of survival. So, the companies that don't build an innovation portfolio and don't apply Lean in a broad way, not for five projects, not enough - that's what I call innovation theater. They need to apply it across the board, right? And I think that's where Steve Blank's work, our work together has actually made a pretty big difference. Now, we just need to convert a couple more companies, because there are only very few that have been able to pull this off - that are really what we would call ‘Invincible Companies.' Ula Ojiaku: [28:15] Can you tell me a bit more about the book, Invincible Company? Alex Osterwalder: [28:19] So, there are three main components to the Invincible Company. Let me tell you about the three characteristics of an invincible company. The first thing is, invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves. So, they're not laying back and saying, ‘hey, I was successful', they don't get arrogant. They constantly reinvent themselves. Typical example is Amazon, constantly reinventing their business model; going into Amazon Web Services, going into logistics, etc. That's number one. Number two, invincible companies, they don't compete on products and technology alone. They compete on superior business models. I believe it's much harder to stay ahead with technology because it's easy to copy. Patents don't make that much sense alone anymore. It's all about speed. So today, if you don't build a superior business model, it's hard to stay ahead. Let me give you an example. Take Apple with the iPhone. It's not the phone per se that's keeping them ahead. What's keeping them ahead is the ecosystem around iOS, with a lot of developers that create a lot of applications; you cannot copy that. You can copy the phone technology - there are tons of phone makers out there. There're only two operating systems, right. So that's a superior business model. The third one is, invincible companies; they transcend industry boundaries. Today, if you look at Amazon, you can't classify them in an industry. They do e-commerce, they do logistics for IT for, you know, web, web infrastructure for companies around the world. Their logistics company - they're competing with UPS. So, you can't classify them in an industry, they have a superior business model. My favorite example, at the moment is a company called Ping An in China, one of the top 30 largest companies in the world, in terms of profitability. Well, what did they do? They moved within seven years, from being a banking and insurance conglomerate, towards becoming a technology player that built the biggest health platform on the planet, a platform called Good Doctor. That came from a bank and insurer - can you imagine that? Right? So, they transcended industry boundaries. And that's why they're ahead of everybody else. So, those are the three characteristics of invincible companies. And then in the book we show well, how do you actually get there? We just described you know, how that animal looks like. How do you become that? So, three things. One, you need to manage a portfolio of business models, you need to improve what you have, and invent the future - innovation funnels, etc… What I just told you before. It's not about making five bets, it's about making 250 bets. And how do you manage that? How do you manage measure risk and uncertainty? Second thing, superior business models; we have a library of patterns, business model patterns, where we give inspiration to people so they can ask themselves questions: ‘How could I improve my business model? How could I create recurring revenues? How could I create a resource castle to protect my business model? How could I shift from product to service? How could I shift like Apple from selling a device to becoming a platform?' So that's the second aspect. And then the third one, which most companies are struggling with, is ‘how do I create an innovation culture systematically? How do I design and manage an innovation culture?' So, it's almost, you could say three books in one. So, you get three for one, if you get The Invincible Company. Ula Ojiaku: [31:54] It sounds very exciting in terms of the work that you must have done to collate these trends and attributes that make up an invincible company. So, what exactly made you guys now say, ‘hey, we need to write this book?' Alex Osterwalder: [32:09] That's a question we always ask because there's so many books out there; the world does not need another business book. So, if we put energy into this, because these projects are pretty big, we had a team of five people working on it, three designers actually six people, three content people. So, it's a crazy effort. The reason was very simple. We had already put a lot of tools out there - and processes - and companies were not moving at the scale we believe is necessary for them to transform to either revive their business models, or tackle challenges like climate change, right? So, you have to be very inventive, innovative, to actually make a profit and become sustainable, like Unilever. So, we said, ‘well, what's missing?' And the big piece missing is the shared language at the senior level, where they can think about ‘how do I manage a portfolio of businesses to fight off disruption? So, I don't get disrupted. But so, I am among the disruptors. So, I invent the future, like Ping An, like Amazon - they invent the future.' You know, they're not the victim of Porter's five forces, they shaped entire industries, right? Porter's five forces was 1985. That's quite a while ago. ‘The world's changed; we need new analytical tools…', I like to joke, right? But so, we didn't see companies moving enough. So, we asked, ‘could we create the tools to help these companies to help the leaders change?' So, we created a very practical set of tools and processes, and procedures so these companies would start to move. Because a lot of senior leaders will tell you, ‘but innovation is a black box. I don't know how to do this. I know how to do mergers and acquisitions. But I don't really know how to do this innovation thing.' So, they kind of move towards buzzwords. ‘Yeah, we're gonna do agile!' Well, that means nothing per se. So yeah, we're gonna work in an agile way when we do this. But that's the mindset. But there's a more to it when you really want to start building an invincible company. So, we packaged all of what we've learned in the field, plus our whole thinking of how can we make it easy for them to capture and work on it. So, taking down the barriers to action, so nothing would prevent them from action. That's how we always decide, ‘should we do another book?' Well, only if we believe we have a very substantial contribution to make. Ula Ojiaku: [34:37] Talking about the three ‘hows' of becoming an invincible company, you did say that the third element was about changing the culture. Alex Osterwalder: [34:48] Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku: [34:49] Now, there is this book I read by John Kotter about Leading Change... Alex Osterwalder: [34:57] Yeah, yeah absolutely Ula Ojiaku: [34:58] And culture changes last. So, what's your view on how best to change culture because usually, people are resistant to change? Alex Osterwalder: [35:09] So, I believe you can actively design and manage culture. You know, every company has a culture. It's just that very few companies design and manage their culture. So, the first thing is, you need to map out the culture that you have. So again, we're tool obsessed. So, we created a tool together with Dave Gray called the Culture Map. And with the Culture Map, you can map out the culture you have, and you can design the culture you want. Okay, that's in a general way. In The Invincible Company, we talk about innovation culture. So, we show what are the blockers that are holding companies back from creating an innovation culture? And we show what are the enablers that companies would have to put in place to create an innovation culture? So simple stuff, right? What's the blocker? I'll give you some blockers. Companies require business plans, business plans are the enemy of innovation, because you force people to sketch out a fantasy over 50 pages, and then you invest in a fantasy and it blows up in your face. It's ridiculous. So, business plans are one enemy of innovation. It's a blocker. Okay, let's look at an enabler. An enabler would be to embrace a culture where you can experiment, fail, learn and iterate. That sounds trivial. But in most companies, you cannot fail, you'll jeopardize your career. So, you need to create a space where experimentation and failure is not just possible - it's mandatory because you know, you need to test ideas. So, if you don't do that deliberately; if you don't have the governance that's going to reward that, in the right place, it's not going to work. And now a lot of people would say, ‘yeah, we do that… we do that.' But it depends how you're doing ‘that'. So, we're very specific with these things and say, well, ‘you're at risk of having an innovation theater, if you don't enable leadership support.' ‘Yeah, well our leaders are supporting it…' Okay? ‘How much time is your leader, your CEO spending on innovation every week?' If he or she is not spending 40% of his or her time on innovation, innovation will not happen at that company, period. So that's an enabler that is not a soft factor is a very hard factor. Because it's actually even less about what the CEO does. It's the symbolic value of a CEO spending 40% of his or her time on innovation, which will show ‘this is important.' And then everybody will work towards what's important for the senior leadership. So, all those kinds of things - we codify them, to take them from the anecdotal evidence towards, ‘here are the three areas you need to look at: leadership support, organizational design, innovation practice. You need to work on those three areas. And you can start to systematically design an innovation culture.' So, I'd say the difference between the days of Kotter, I still love Kotter's work, is I do believe today, we can more actively design culture and make it happen. Is it easy? No, it's really hard. Are we going to face resistance? Yes. But if you do it well, I can tell you when it comes to innovation, people are hungry for it. They're just waiting for it. So, all you have to do - you don't even need to design enablers, just take away the obstacles and everything else will happen. Ula Ojiaku: [38:40] Oh, fantastic. So, the what book do you find yourself giving as a gift to people the most and why - in addition to your fantastic suite of books? Alex Osterwalder: [38:53] So… there's just so many that I don't have one ‘go-to' book that I would really recommend. It's depending on what are people looking at, you know, what is their challenge, and I would recommend the right kind of book that I have in mind for the right challenge. So, I don't like doing an overall thing. There is one book that I just put is the foundation of working the right way, which is John Medina's Brain Rules. So, it's actually a brain scientist. He's very funny. He wrote a book called Brain Rules. It's all based on peer reviewed science, there's a certain number of rules that you need to follow in everything you do: designing a workshop, managing your company, you know, teaching something, being a parent. So, if you follow those brain rules, well, you're very likely to have more success. With the work you're doing, you're gonna achieve better results, because you're following the way your brain works, right? And a lot of the work we do is actually not, not right. So, I'll give you an example. He talks about visuals, every single person on the planet is visual, guess what? It's evolution – (there) used to be a lion running after us. Well, we would need to see it and run away. That's visual. That's evolution. Those who didn't see it coming, they're not here anymore, right? Evolution ate them up. So, we're visual, by definition. That's why when you write when you create a book or a slide deck, using visuals is not a nice to have; of course, everybody has their style. But if you really do it well, you use the words for the right thing, use visuals for the right thing, you're gonna have a huge impact. Because by evolution, every one of us, every single one of us is visual. So that's one brain rule, which sounds a little bit trivial. But the really good insights there of rules you should never break. Right? So that's one I do recommend. But then everything else is based on the challenges I see with, you know, what people are struggling with. Ula Ojiaku: [40:47] I would add that to my library of books to read then. Now, would you have any advice for individuals starting up in their entrepreneurship journey? And also, what advice would you have? So, there are two questions here: what do you have for organizations starting off their lean innovation journey? So, individuals and organizations. Alex Osterwalder: [41:14] So, for both, I would say fear nothing, embrace failure. So, you know, then people tell me, ‘don't always talk about failure. It's not about failure. It's not about failures, is it? It's about learning.' No, it's not about learning. It's about actually adapting your idea until you figure out what works, right? But a lot of that will be failure. And a big part of the innovation journey is you know, falling down and getting up. So, my big advice to individuals is, don't believe those people on the cover of a magazine because you don't see the failure they went through. And if there's somebody who didn't have that much failure, they kind of got lucky. But that's one in a million. So, don't get blinded by those pictures that the press put in front of us. Success; there is no shortcut. Yeah, you can get lucky. But that's one out of a million. Success is hard work. It's a lot of failure. It's a lot of humiliation. Those who get over humiliation, those who can stand up, those are, those are gonna win. However, sometimes you need to stop, right? So, when people say, ‘ah, never give up!' Well, knowing when to stop is not giving up. When you're not made for something, when the idea (you had) – (you find out) there's no business there, you better stop because you're gonna waste all of your money and energy for something that's not there. But you can take those learnings and apply it, maybe to a different opportunity. So never, never fear failure, right is an important one to always get up. That's for individuals. For companies, I'd say go beyond innovation theater. So, break the myths and figure out how innovation really works. Open up what still might be a black box or question yourself, you know, are we really doing Strategic Growth and Innovation? Because a lot of companies will say, ‘Yeah, we do that, we do Lean Startup, we do Agile.' Yeah, but then you look under the hood, it's really innovation theater. When you really do this well, you actually invest in 200, 300, 400 projects at a time, small amounts. And you're really good at killing ideas to let the best emerge. So, it's not about making a few big bets. It's about making hundreds and hundreds of small bets. And then continuously invest like a venture capitalist in those ideas and teams that are bubbling up, right. So, go beyond innovation theater, learn how this really works. This is a profession. This is not something you learn over a weekend at a masterclass anymore. That's how you get started. This is a hard profession treated differently than management. Managing an innovation, management and execution and innovation and entrepreneurship are two different planets. So please accept that. That's my advice to organizations. Take it seriously, otherwise, you're gonna die. Ula Ojiaku: [43:51] Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation with you, Alex, thank you again for being on this show. Alex Osterwalder: [43:58] Thanks for having me. Wonderful questions. Great conversation.
Cold Star Tech founder Jason Kanigan speaks at Brown University's Space Horizons 2021 event. [**NOTE: the first few seconds are indeed silent... in the video version there is a title slide.] The topic is space entrepreneurship, particularly on the commercial side. Jason covers what he has found in interviewing over 150 space industry academics, experts and founders, and the state of commercial space entrepreneurship. In the Q&A we also get into what space students can do to advance their careers. Hosted by Dr. Rick Fleeter and his students. Space Horizons website: http://www.spacehorizonsatbrown.org/ Books referenced: Space Is Open For Business, Robert C. Jacobson; Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder OpEx Society: https://www.opexsociety.org Get new episodes directly in your inbox: https://www.coldstartech.com/msb Talk to Cold Star: https://www.coldstartech.com/bookcall
What does it take to write a truly useful book? How do you measure and optimize reader engagement? Our guest today is Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test and entrepreneur. You’ll hear Rob’s take on traditional publishing vs self-publishing, customer interviews, testing, iteration cycles, book marketing, reader profiles, and his DEEP writing framework.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.Show NotesThe Mom Test, Workshop Survival Guide — Rob’s booksDEEP — Rob’s framework for writing (Desirable, Effective, Engaging and Polished)Authority — a book by Nathan BarryThe E-myth Revisited — a book by Michael E. GerberSense & Respond Press, Rosenfeld Media — tech-themed publishersThe Tiny MBA — a book by Alex HillmanThe Brain Audit — a book by Sean D’SouzaAlexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur — the authors of Business Model Generation who invested heavily in illustrations for their bookwriteusefulbooks.com — Rob’s websiteFollow Rob on Twitter or email him at rob@robfitz.comToday’s SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Userlist — a lifecycle messaging tool for your SaaS product. At Userlist, our mission is to make your founder journey more enjoyable and less overwhelming. That’s why we built an email automation tool that does exactly what you need. No more, no less. Manage your users, segment them, and get in touch throughout their journey — all based on their behavior. Try Userlist free whenever you’re ready at userlist.com.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here’s how.
Litteratur-kanon og agile rimer temmelig dårligt. Men i denne episode gør Ole og Katrine alligevel forsøget og skaber den ultimative agile læseliste. Ole går som sædvanlig struktureret og systematisk til værks med det komplette overblik over enhver tænkelig kategori. Og ikke overraskende har Katrine en mere følelsesladet tilgang, hvor hun fortæller personlige historier om sine bog-anbefalinger. Sådan er mennesker jo heldigvis forskellige
Bio Entrepreneur-turned-educator, Steve Blank is the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship. Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement, he's changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate. Steve is the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner's Manual -- and his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story defined the Lean Startup movement. He teaches at Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley and NYU; and created the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps -- now the standard for science commercialization in the U.S. His Hacking for Defense class at Stanford is revolutionizing how the U.S. defense and intelligence community can deploy innovation with speed and urgency, and its sister class, Hacking for Diplomacy, is doing the same for foreign affairs challenges managed by the U.S. State Department. Steve blogs at www.steveblank.com Books/ Resources: Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step by Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Where to Play: 3 Steps to Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities by Marc Gruber and Sharon Tal Social media profiles: Blog/ website: steveblank.com Twitter handle: @sgblank Steve's students' slides: https://www.slideshare.net/sblank Interview transcript Ula Ojiaku 00:52 So we have Steve Blank, the legend himself. Thank you so much for making the time to join me on the show. Steve Blank 00:59 I'm excited to talk to you and your listeners. This should be fun. Ula Ojiaku 01:03 Definitely. I've listened to other podcasts or shows where you said you grew up in a dysfunctional family and growing up in chaos kind of helped shape you into who you are. And there was some sort of silver lining in that cloud. Can you elaborate on that? How did that shape you into the Steve Blank we see and admire today? Steve Blank 01:22 Sure, you know, my family circumstances, while difficult, aren't unique. I mean, lots of people in the world too wake up and not quite know what's going to go on the next day but I think there's a couple things. One is it makes you focus on survival, and also helps you shut out all the things that are not important for survival. So I grew up not understanding, but actually you did much later in life that when there's chaos around me, I'm able to figure out about what I consider the fog of war, where are we heading, where everybody else is running around, going, Oh, it's confusing, or you know, things are going off around you to kind of go rifle shot in figuring out where the exit is. And it turns out that that's the world's cruelest but most effective training ground for early stage entrepreneur. And that's exactly the physical danger is, it's exactly what a founding CEO encounters the first year to their company. Nothing goes right, everything's unpredictable, things are going on around you yet you need to stay focused on what it is to do and have a bias for action rather than passively sitting around waiting for things to be fixed. And I didn't understand that until I was in a war zone in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Luckily, I was well away from where people were actually shooting at me but in the Air Force, I got to do things that I never would have gotten to do anywhere else in a civilian life at a very early age. And realize that combined with some other skills I had, which probably were only two. But you know, the other one was I was pretty good at pattern recognition. And then three is I was curious about everything way beyond my paygrade. Four is I showed up a lot, which I think is 80% of what a young entrepreneur needs to do, is show up more than most people. And those are the skills that have lasted me the last 40 years. Ula Ojiaku 03:09 Wow, you've launched about eight companies, and some of them went on to IPO. So how did that quality of showing up help you? Steve Blank 03:19 Showing up a lot, you know, varied throughout my career. But it was consistently being where other people were out drinking or partying or said it's too hard to do, or Gee, I don't want to volunteer for that. And, you know, in the military, the version was working extra hours to help people just because I was interested in what they were doing. And by accident getting noticed, I mean I wasn't trying to get noticed, but I did. The rule was never volunteer for anything but I volunteered for everything. And half of them really were crummy jobs but the other half were incredibly interesting. My entrepreneurial career, my test of whether you're cut out to work these hours is when I was living in Silicon Valley, I often would call people in New York and just say, oh by the way, I'm going to be having coffee across the street from you tomorrow, do you mind if I drop in and call you? I had no plans to do that but if they said yes, I would jump on a redeye and will literally take a 15 minute meeting, because showing up a lot might have got me an order and multiple times it did. If you're not willing to do those things and put yourself out for the extra effort and believe it's going to come to you, it's okay but don't choose a startup as a job. It takes that extraordinary effort, showing up a lot just doesn't mean cruising across the street or something else. I retired when I was no longer willing to get down that redeye for the 10 minute meeting, it meant I was too old to play that game. Someone else was going to do that, someone I was competing with would have had that passion and energy to do it. Ula Ojiaku 04:49 Well, that's really impressive. You are an adjunct professor at Stanford University, you're also a guest lecturer at many other notable higher education institutions. The funny thing is that you admit you're a college dropout. Steve Blank 05:05 I still laugh every time and I want to make the point, I'm not exceptional, I'm the exception. And there's a difference there, you know, I've taught in multiple places and then every place I've been if I had to pick the odds over the group of people who's going to succeed, someone who's dropped out or someone who actually had the discipline of sticking it out four years and even learning what community college or four year college pay odds are much better for people who stay in college. There's a small group of people, maybe not so small, like I was at the time, who just didn't have discipline. I was completely undisciplined, couldn't see the value of why I was there, was doing horribly and was completely out of control and I probably needed reform school at the time. I chose the military as an alternative. I think that's an edge case and it's not that I regretted it but I've spent my life catching up on those missing pieces of my education, both undergrad and grad school, I probably should have went to. Somebody should be thinking about, if you are literally out of control and don't have the discipline, that's probably the reason not to be in college, and you need to gain the maturity and the skills to go back. I wish someone had counselled me to do that and I'm not sure I for a long time had that discipline and maturity to go back. So yeah, I think I'm an exception to a set of heuristics that I think probably say today even more, so if you could stick it out, it is worth staying in. Ula Ojiaku 06:35 Thanks for that. Steve Blank 06:37 And by the way for a couple reasons, let me just be clear, one is the education you're going to get. And the second is, regardless of the school you go to, you're going to build up a network of people who because you were in close proximity with them, you will later on in your career, be able to count on or use your network, including your professors and other people. Ula Ojiaku 06:58 What I hear you saying is, in addition to the education, your networking opportunities could serve you for the rest of your career. Steve Blank 07:06 Yeah, Ula Ojiaku 07:07 That's great. So you are the father of the Lean Startup Movement. In my research for this conversation, I learned that it was some sort of massive failure that started you on the path. Is it something you can talk about? Steve Blank 07:22 Sure. You know, by the time I had done six startups, I was thought of as a successful entrepreneur and attracted a lot of funding for my next startup, which is a video game company, which turned out to be a real mistake for multiple reasons. One is my entire career up till then my customers had been scientists or engineers, or technical people. And what I didn't truly understand is I was now getting into a business where, number one, my customers were going to be 14 year old boys who wanted to kill something. And two is that I was actually not in a business where technology actually mattered at all, it was in fact, maybe a first or even third derivative of what they really cared about; I was in the entertainment business. Well, if somebody would have told me, Steve, you're going to be CEO of an entertainment company, even I would have said don't give this guy any money. But we didn't understand, I didn't understand it, neither did my investors. Make a long story short, I created that company, I was the CEO, I mean, lots of reasons why it went down. And when it failed, I absolutely went through blame my co-founder, blame everybody else, blame my VCs, be angry, go get depressed, and whatever. But after it failed, and back then losing $35 million, was actually considered a lot of money, that was a pretty visible failure. You know, I went through the step of, as I said, anger, depression, whatever, and then acceptance. But then I tried to extract a set of heuristics, a set of rules of what did I learn from not only that, but where did it succeed. And I put those rules together, what came out of that is the beginnings of customer development. And in my next company, Epiphany, which was my last company, the company had an $8 billion market cap, when I went home. We went from zero to $125 billion in three years. That wasn't just me, that was incredible set of co-founders and a CEO we had brought in and 800 other wonderful people, but everything we had learned, or I had learned from that failure just came together and we nailed it in that one. You know, what a definition of failed entrepreneur is? Ula Ojiaku 09:27 I'm not sure Steve Blank 09:22 Experienced. It's a big idea. I failed miserably and publicly yet, in fact, that was quite fundable. Because as long as you're not blaming the failure on everybody else, and you kind of own up to, here are the mistakes I made, and say, well I'm not doing that business again, it turns out that investors were more than willing to write us a cheque. And I think that's unique about places where entrepreneurship is well understood, in other countries or other cultures, when you lose that amount of money for people, they're coming after you or you've ruined your reputation forever. That's not the case in certainly in Silicon Valley, and in London, and other places where entrepreneurship is understood. So that was the beginning of the Lean Startup, using some of the key tenants that epiphany, but still, I didn't have a theory or strategy. It wasn't till I retired, that I actually started writing believe it or not, my memoirs. And I realized 80 pages in that no one really was going to read them, I'd even have to pay my children to read them but there were some lessons learned about success and failure that no one had noticed before. By then I was not only doing my companies but sitting on boards of others, public and private. And that a much broader view of innovation entrepreneurship. The difference between success and failure is whether you just simply built a company around your beliefs and launch the product versus spent a lot of time testing your beliefs, not doing a giant focus group, still staying focused on your vision, but trying to validate or invalidate whether what you were building was correct. And I realized that there was very little literature on innovation entrepreneurship for early stage companies. Back in the turn of the century, there was a ton of literature on how to do innovation inside of large corporations but there was almost no literature on how to do innovation in a garage. And when I went to business school leaders in a variety of universities and pointed this out, I literally got a virtual pat on the head that said, Steve, don't worry your little head, how hard could six people in a garage be? We consult for companies with tens of thousands of people. And then I realized that most business school academics didn't work in startups and therefore, if they consulted, they consulted for major corporations and didn't have the domain expertise of what was unique about early stage ventures. About its funding environment, about its customer environment, about burn rate and things that were critical to understand when your company is starting in your basement versus your company is launching a new product, versus your company that has thousands of people. And those are very different types of innovation entrepreneurship. So the Lean Startup method started with me looking around and going, I think what we're doing is probably not optimal, which is a fancy word for saying, I think we're very wrong, there might be a better way to do this, Ula Ojiaku 12:22 That nicely goes into the other question that I had for you. You said in one of your books that every startup needs a mission statements and a set of core values, because as you're doing customer discovery, they're going to get conflicting feedback. So there has to be a way of filtering to know the right feedback to follow in developing the products. Steve Blank 12:47 You know, one of the things if you're a founder is this idea of customer development, getting out of the building, talking to customers, building a minimum viable products, etc., with a giant focus group. So hey, I'll talk to everybody, I'll get some of their features, and they'll build that product. Yeah, maybe but then that kind of makes you a product manager, not really a founder with a vision. You know for me, there's a subtle but important difference is, no, no, I have a vision, I'm the founder, or maybe me and my co-founder have a vision. Let's now go out and validate or invalidate or modify our hypothesis, which is by the way a fancy Stanford word for guesses. But I have put a stake in the ground where I think the world is and where customers will want to buy and let's see if that's correct. Rather than continuing moving the goalposts, if you put the stake in the ground that says, here's our vision, here's the product, here's the customer, here's the distribution channel, here's the pricing, here's whatever, okay, now instead of launching the product around that, let's go validate or invalidate it as best as we can. Oh, and I'm allowed to, and here's the big idea what changed everything about Lean, and I'm allowed to change before I ship based on what I learned outside the building, that's called a pivot. A pivot is just a substantive change in one or more things you learn about your business model. And the business model is a fancy word for all the things that make an idea, a commercially viable company. That is, you know, who my customers what features do they want, and how much should I charge? How much, what are the costs? Where do I build it, etc. So as I'm learning about this stuff, I might change my vision or modify it, going well, that's great, the product is right, but the people I thought are customers are completely different, or the customers are right, but they only want features three, nine, and fifteen. Hey, I shouldn't waste time on those other things until later, or maybe never. That's what they're getting out of the building is about and that's back to mission and vision. The other thing about mission is once you discover that, then you could share that vision with your entire company. Here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it, here's what it means, here's our goals. And that should permeate the company from top to bottom. At the same time, as you do mission, you could also be setting culture and culture in a startup is really important. Is it do anything at all costs? Who cares about ethics? You know, I wouldn't recommend that but regardless of what you say, your employees will model their behavior on what you do, not what you say. Or is it like no, we work six days a week that's culture or gee our culture is dancing allowed and free food or no dogs, but free food or no free food or, I mean, these things need to not only be said, but they need to be modeled. So if the CEO says we need to jump on an airplane anywhere, anytime, but he or she doesn't do that then that's a pretty bad model. Or if they say, oh no, we really believe in work life balance, and we want you all out of here at 5:30. That's another model, but the CEO shouldn't be sitting in the building. Does that make sense? Ula Ojiaku 16:04 Makes a whole lot of sense. Yes. Steve Blank 16:07 I've been working with large companies and government agencies, and I'm trying to emulate the same process that startups do inside of the corporations and governments. And is that the issue in large organizations are not whether you have people as smart as you have in startups, and just note to large corporation and government, you have smarter people there, you have more of them. What's different is the nature of the corporation. What I mean by that is, a corporation or government agency is designed for scale. And when you design for scale, you put in place processes and procedures and metrics and OKRs, and KPIs to measure performance. And therefore, people believe that these are the walls and rules and kind of guidelines that you operate in. And it kind of, that's great actually for scale, that's how larger organizations stay in sync and on scale, and it works wonderfully, when there's a repeatable environment that is operating it. But in fact, when chaos starts happening outside, when you're being disrupted by either competitors in commercial companies, or by adversaries in the government, or, gee you're no longer part of the EU, all of a sudden, Ula Ojiaku 17:24 Not quite yet there Steve Blank 17:25 But all of a sudden, the world has changed. But those processes and procedures you put in place, were for a steady state repeatable environment. And therefore, you now need to inject some new innovation. But if you look at your rule book and Handbook, there is no rules for innovation entrepreneurship and in fact, that usually conflicts with all those processes that is your supply chain, you know, isn't “No, you can't order something from Amazon we have you know these contracts…”, or “no you can't just jump on an airplane, you need the approval of four supervisors to go do this…”. “No, you can't start this new division, you need to take the most, you know, senior people…”, why, but those are the last people I want in an innovation group. All these things, by the way, are real things I've run into, Ula Ojiaku 18:09 I have experienced them as well. Steve Blank 18:12 So in fact, what you really needed in a government and in corporations is an innovation doctrine and doctrine is kind of like, what are the meta rules for how we deal with innovation, it shouldn't just be, oh, I have a corporate accelerator incubator, isn't that great? Because what that really means is I have innovation theater, I really haven't figured out how to integrate all this stuff from leadership to an innovation pipeline, or a process that runs in parallel. And the mistake people make in the first pass of doing this, is thinking that you're going to turn everybody in your large organization into an entrepreneur and I have found that that's just a fatal error. Not everybody comes to work to be an entrepreneur, the fact that you have some great entrepreneurs in your organization is a key idea but that's not what the rest of your organization sign up for. So the question is, is how do you get a larger organization to both chew gum and walk at the same time, it needs to be ambidextrous. And this is again, a concept from 20th century. Tishman and O'Reilly, two professors, one from Stanford and MIT talked about this for decades, when it was a nice to have in the 20th century. I'll contend that being ambidextrous and having an innovation doctrine is essential for survival in the 21st century, whether it's a company or government, and I think we see lots of companies and governments trying to struggle with how to kind of move into this, I no longer need to do one thing, but I need to do two things at a time. I need to execute and I need to innovate in parallel. That's hard. Ula Ojiaku 19:53 Yeah, sure. And that kind of also brings in to mind the three horizons as proposed by McKinsey. You said that you have the horizon one, where you have your cash cow stable, and then you're also looking into the future and making sure to also invest in things that could be the next big thing. And I guess going back to your reference to ambidextrous organizations, that would be a key capability that will be required in an organization to be able to realize that, what do you think? Steve Blank 20:23 Well, you know, I think again it starts with leadership and by leadership, the board of directors or managing board, not just the CEO, need to pick up and say, wait a minute, is it business as usual or do we need some change? And if you don't realize that the world around you has changed and that you're being put out of business, that is if you're in a retail business selling clothes or something else, you wake up and you discovered Amazon is taking your business. Or if you're in the government, and you realize gee, you know, the world is no longer with facing one adversary or facing multiple adversaries or gee Healthcare changed or something else, it needs to start from there. Because if there is no impetus for change, the status quo will continue until it's too late. And as I said, creative destruction is kind of okay for corporations, it's not okay for government agencies where the country has a kind of, has an obligation to its citizens to be ahead of the game not behind it. And once but let's say in a positive sense, you realize that change, the biggest thing that companies fail to do is communicate it coherently and repeatedly to the rest of the organization; is here's what we need to do to still stay in business. And it's not that everybody needs to panic and scurry around but here's how we need to organize for continuing our core business as we transition into either new businesses or new ways of doing business. And as you said, one of the tactics is realizing that there are three horizons of innovation, one is just making our existing product line or services better, horizon one, or expanding to adjacent spaces, or different distribution channels with different customers with the same products or technology, horizon two. Or creating new things that just didn't exist before. That is one tool that, you know, leadership can kind of use in a large organization, at least in a corporate world, you could acquire, you could partner, you could buy. In a startup, you know, all you have are your own resources but corporations actually have a lot more moves than startups in thinking about innovation. When they first realize at the leadership level that things have changed. But you also need to build these parallel processes of, you know, okay well, how's HR going to deal with innovation and execution, it can't be the same rules. The real test is, if in a large company or government agency, you have the same exact rules and processes and procedures for execution, as you do for innovation, then you don't really have a company or organization that's going to survive. There needs to be parallel processes and in fact, the other thing you need is an innovation end to end process, not just I have an incubator accelerator and look at our great demos. But what's the end to end process from sourcing ideas and people and technology and problems, all the way to delivery or deployment of those services outside the building? Very few organizations have that kind of as a full function continuous innovation process but that's what's required. Ula Ojiaku 23:23 Right. So with respect to that though, you're saying there has to be, you have to have parallel processes in place so there is innovation going on. However, the business as usual, or keeping the lights on, like HR or finance, how they tie into it needs to also be thought through. Would you then say that all these details need to be worked out before an organization tries to create some innovation? Or is this something that could be worked out, whilst doing it? Steve Blank 24:03 So in a perfect world, it would start with from the top, from a board of directors, the sea level conversation that acknowledges that status quo is taking you off the cliff. And by off the cliff, meaning sales are going to decline or government services are going to be less effective, or the country is going to be less competitive if we continue this way. That's the first discussion in a perfect world. What really happens though, is today, there's a sea of unhappy entrepreneurs sitting inside your company or government organization who already exist, beating their head against the wall. In fact, the symptom of this it's been going on for decades, is that we always hear stories about what I call heroic innovation. That is we celebrate these people who actually have fought against the system and get something done and we give them awards. Instead of saying, well wait a minute, these people are symptoms of a broken process, and actually don't have any process for them to; it shouldn't have required heroics to do this. Kind of like, it was the same light bulb that went on when I wrote the first book about what became lean in four steps to epiphany. The light bulb is why are we celebrating heroics, instead of being embarrassed that the system is broken? And so in every organization, this is what I meant when I said there are more entrepreneurs and innovators inside larger organizations than there are startups. Startups though are organized to capture their energy and their passion and their innovation. Corporations and government organizations are organized to actually beat it out of them. Again, not because of malice or bad or people being stupid, it's just that the big lightbulb hasn't gone on that says no, we need different processes, we need an end to end, that is we don't even have that language inside of a corporation, other than trying to steal and by steal I mean, in a nice sense, all the processes from a startups, which really don't map into companies and government agencies because they have different goals, different missions, different incentives. We can take the ethos of a startup and put it inside of companies and government organizations, and we could harness that same passion but we need very different processes and procedures than those that startups use. Ula Ojiaku 26:23 Very true. I'll just move on to the final part of this conversation. Following your work, reading, you know, your blogs and listening to some of your conversations on other media platforms, you sound to me like you're a lifelong learner. So is there any book that you found yourself gifting the most to people? And if so, what's that book and why? Steve Blank 26:51 Well, on the business side, Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Generation book was a real eye opener for me. You know, my work, as part of lean, lean has three parts; customer development, agile engineering, and the business model canvas. And it really took the three of us, my work was the customer development process, Eric Ries, who wrote a great book called The Lean Startup was the one who observed agile engineering was a great partner to that. But Osterwalder's work on the business model canvas gave us kind of a scorecard and he originally intended it as a static diagram. And I realized it was actually much more useful as one that was dynamic and got updated over time. So those three books, My Four Steps to Epiphany, Ries's Lean Startup Guide, and Osterwalder's Business Model Generation should be kind of the three texts that sit on an entrepreneur shelf, to kind of understand the basics. There's some other later reading, I mean, there are hundreds of books; Marc Gruber wrote a book called Where To Play: 3 Steps For Discovering Your Most Valuable Opportunities, I now kind of think of as the front end of the process. But I should just point out it would be kind of ironic, if I didn't, is that entrepreneurship is not a reading the book activity, it's an experiential activity. So you can't read the book and then say, I now know or watch the videos or you know, have videos on Udacity and other places. It really is read the book in context with actually getting your hands dirty and by getting your hands dirty, I mean, build something, test it, get out of the building, etc. Even if it's something small, that's as important as it is understanding the theory. The theory might give you a light bulb, you know, like oh, this is where I should be spending some time. But getting out and getting your teeth kicked is probably the best confirmation. Then you go, Oh, I miss page 47 where it said, this is what will happen. So that's my advice for both reading and doing. Ula Ojiaku 28:52 Great. Thank you. And we will have the books you've mentioned in the show notes as well as links to them so thanks for that. So to wrap up, you've already given us some good advice in terms of not just read the book, go out there, and get your hands dirty, get something built, get it tested, get it validated. Would there be any other advice you'd have for upcoming entrepreneurs? (last word not clear) Steve Blank 29:21 This one's kind of interesting is that, you know, nowadays entrepreneurship, starting a company is kind of cool. It's like your friends are doing it, you're doing it and people tend to think, gee a startup is a job and I think that's the world's worst mistake. Startup isn't a job, at least now I'm talking about being a founder, or co-founder and startup is not a job; it's a calling, right. There are great jobs out there but being a founder is closer to being an artist than any other profession. If you're not called, if there isn't an itch, you need to scratch, if there isn't something you need to get out of your system, then you might be in the wrong profession. Because a job says hey, you show up every day and you get paid, in a startup you show up every day, and I hate to tell your listeners the bad news is, the answer you're going to fail. Much like a painter, every painting or sculpture or play or music you write, or play you write is not a success, most of them are crummy, and you just kind of missed it. And you get up and feel bad and then you do another one because you're driven to do that. That's what a true founder is, and it doesn't mean you can't work in a startup. I wasn't prepared to do that my first three or four times in a startup, I'm the spear carrier in the back of this play, meaning I, you know, where you see the opera and there are people in the back. Those are the people who are kind of part of the stage but really not in the front. That was me learning by apprenticeship because I really didn't have that, I have the DNA, but I didn't have the skillset to understand what it was. Nowadays, you could learn much more rapidly than I could have in the 20th century. But still, you need to be driven by, I can't imagine doing anything else with my life or my time. This ain't a job, you could join a startup as a job but if you want to be a founder, you really ought to think about this is how you want to live your life. Yeah, it's with lots of ups and downs and hills and valleys but you have to have passion and drive and vision and curiosity that besides agility, and ambition to make it happen. Ula Ojiaku 31:35 Wow. Thank you very much, Steve, that's inspiring. One last thing before we go, where can the audience find you, are you on social media? What's the first place to go? Steve Blank 31:46 The first place to go is my website, steveblank.com. There's more information for entrepreneurs than ever existed in Silicon Valley in the 20th century packed into one. There's a tabs on top, books to read, Secret History of Silicon Valley, some other things. I'm on Twitter at @sgblank, @sgblank. There's also a series of presentations, slide final decks from all my students on slideshare.net @sblank. And you will find over 600 presentations of my students summaries actually going through my classes. So hopefully to all your listeners have a great time being an entrepreneur. It's the world's worst job, but great call. Take care. Ula Ojiaku 32:35 And you too. Thank you so much. Thanks. Steve Blank 32:38 Bye, bye. Ula Ojiaku 32:39 Bye.
Today's guest needs no introduction. Essentially, if you run a startup and you haven't heard of Steve Blank, can you even call yourself an entrepreneur?Steve is the ultimate serial entrepreneur, retiring in 1999 with eight high technology startups under his belt. He coined the term ‘customer development', codifying what that was in the inaugural start up book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany - the start up book that kickstarted the lean startup revolution. He then went on to teach a course at Stanford based on what he had codified around startups and what makes the successful ones successful. And one of the guys on his course was a chap called Eric Ries, who you might have heard of for writing a book called The Lean Startup. Then he found himself on the front cover of Harvard Business Review with his book and that, as they say, is history. Steve went on to change the way the world thinks about startups. This is truly a fascinating conversation, we talk about what the job of the CEO is, what customer development is, why innovation is so hard and why established businesses hit a plateau. On today's podcast:The Lean StartupEric Ries & Alex OsterwalderThe difference between search and executionThe personality of a founderThe job of a CEOExecutioners and innovatorsLinks:Book - The Four Steps To The Epiphany
The topic of this podcast is INNOVATION, the type of innovation that makes a company strive questioning first and foremost the way it does business; its business model. My guest today is an innovation rockstar, the co-author of the newly released book Business Model Shifts, 6 new ways to create value for customers, and with him I will try to understand which systematics steps can a business take to reinvent itself, leveraging the worlds hottest trends.Patrick Van der Pijl is CEO of Business Models Inc. an award winning global business design agency on strategy and innovation, a keynote speaker, a best selling author, and a renowned business model strategist. Patrick is producer of bestseller book Business Model Generation which sold over four million copies in 37 languages and which U.S.A. today named among the 12 best business books of all timePatrick has researched over 200 global business models for the book we'll discuss today, titled “Business Model Shifts” 6 shifts in business modelling from pipeline to platform, analog to digital, shareholder to stakeholder, singular to circular, products to services and linear to exponential.Listening to this interview not only will you understand how companies like Uber, Grasp, New10, Alibaba, Salesforce, Warby Parker and many more have changed the competitive landscape in which they operate, but you will also learn the theoretical foundations upon which you can trigger the innovation your business needs to strive today, and in the future.
Começa hoje a segunda temporada do Conversas Startup Podcast (CSPod)!
From the Host: Katherine Ann Byam I met Alex virtually in May 2020 through attending his virtual masterclass on building invincible companies. At the time, we were still figuring out how to run massive scale virtual workshops, yet Alex and his team executed this with ease. I was curious to learn what inspires the world's #4 Management Thinker. I had the honour of asking Alex these 3 questions: What's your why – what question gets you out of bed every morning with a burning desire to solve it? We know in our world today we have a burning platform of sustainability. What do you currently see as the role of business in solving these problems? We know from your work that Innovation is heavily influenced by a company's culture. What are the top 3 things that companies with a great innovation culture do to sustain that culture and expand their economic lives? About our Guest - Dr Alexander Osterwalder 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 top 50 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 published in Spring 2020. To learn more about Alex's work you can sign up for their newsletter via the following link https://www.strategyzer.com/ Where Ideas Launch - the Podcast for the Unexpected Innovator is hosted by Katherine Ann Byam and sponsored by Dieple Virtual Service Hub. DVSH is her consulting firm that supports modern day service based and manufacturing start ups to scale up with Strategy, Process Optimisation, and Advanced Analytics. Check it out on the following link https://www.dieple.com/vsh/
معرفی و خلاصه کتاب خلق مدل کسب و کار Business Model Generation برای طراحی و تشریح و بهبود کسب و کار فقط یک راه هست، باید مدلش کنیم. ما آدمها برای شناخت و حل مسائل پیش رو همه چیز رو مدل سازی میکنیم. برای مدل سازی کسب و کار هم یک چارچوب کامل و جامع داریم که در این کتاب معرفی شده است. متن و روایت: امین علیرضایی
Have you got a bunch of business ideas swirling around in your head? Maybe you have no idea which one will be successful and you have no clue how to pick the winning horse. Listen to a listener struggling with the same thing, and my advice to them about how to pick & test the right business idea. Podcast Notes… How do you know Which idea to start with? How do you pick the right idea? 1. Let it marinate. Don't feel like you have to build the business within one month. Don't feel like it has to launch or it has to exist out in the world just because it's an idea. 2. Talk to people about your ides. The more that you talk about that idea, the more that you're giving yourself permission for it to be something that exists outside of your head. 3. Write a business model canvas. The Business Model Canvas is one of the simplest and easiest things to do. It's a one page document that allows you to really think through all the moving parts of your idea. 4. Set up some criteria and measure your ideas against them. I wrote a list of criteria that were important for me for any business that I was going to take forward. Once I had all my personal criterias. I rent them in order of preference. 5. Think big, but test small. Pare your idea down to its smallest part and create a smaller, more manageable version of that idea and test it. Podcast Mentions… The Business Model Canvas - available for download here. I also have this book - Business Model Generation, which is seriously helpful & I would highly recommend it. > Follow me over on Instagram @micaelakarina > Follow the podcast on Instagram @viaairmailpodcast > Leave me a voicemail with your questions, comments, and feedback: Click “message” & start recording! > E-mail me: viaairmailpodcast@gmail.com > Sign up for my newsletter - I send little helpful, insightful letters every two weeks - straight to your inbox. > Leave me a review! It will help others discover this podcast!
Alexander Osterwalder is an entrepreneur, author, business model innovator, and co-founder of Strategyzer, a SaaS company that helps organizations develop better growth engines, powerful business models, and so much more. In this episode, Alex discusses the innovative way he wrote the Business Model Generation book and explains why the Business Model Canvas is an excellent tool for businesses looking to challenge their current business model. 02:55 - Why did Alex write the book, Business Model Generation. 04:00 - How Alex crowd sourced the book. 09:00 - What is the Business Model Canvas all about? 11:15 - There is no such thing as the one and only business tool. You need to combine tools based on your needs. 17:15 - What kinds of conversations is Alex hearing from the C-suite executives about business models? 19:40 - How do you price a cure that's going to heal people with one injection? 21:35 - You can still be innovative on inferior technology. 24:00 - We're still stuck in the last century when it comes to developing innovation. 29:00 - There are some great lessons you can learn from Expresso. 34:15 - Large corporations are trying hard to be innovative, but only a few of them are able to succeed. 36:55 - What is Alex's business model? 41:55 - What has Alex changed his mind about recently? 43:40 - What does Alex do to remain creative? 44:35 - What does Alex attribute his success to in life? Resources: http://www.outsidelens.com/outsidevoices
¿Cómo analizar y diseñar o rediseñar nuestra empresa, ya sea nueva o existente? ¿Qué método nos puede permitir analizar todos los puntos a tener en cuenta a la hora de plasmar nuestra idea de negocio en algo tangible? En este episodio te resumo Generación de Modelos de Negocio (Business Model Generation, 2010), de Alexander Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur, que nos detalla el "lienzo de modelo de negocios", o Business Model Canvas, y los 9 módulos que lo componen, y que nos va a facilitar enormemente esa tarea. Este libro lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: Generación de Modelos de Negocio - http://amzn.to/2G2Fj3H Aquí te puedes descargar la plantilla para practicar libremente con la creación de modelos: plantilla del Business Model Canvas Si quieres profundizar en el tema, los creadores tienen una página con cursos y recursos: Strategyzer.com Y en esta página encuentras las notas del episodio de hoy: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/083 ________ Episodio patrocinado por Instituto de Emprendedores: Conoce el Plan Midas, 5 fases y 10 pasos para pasar de no tener ni siquiera una idea de negocio a tener una empresa de éxito, funcionando, generando ingresos y calidad de vida para ti y los tuyos. Enfócate en conseguir tus metas con una empresa que te proporcione los mejores resultados. El Instituto de Emprendedores te da el plan de ruta para alcanzarlo. Contenidos y coaching grupal con Luis Ramos, de Libros para Emprendedores. Consigue tus metas, ¡AHORA! ________ ¿Necesitas un hosting de garantías para tu página web? ¿Rápido y con el mejor servicio al cliente? En Libros para Emprendedores utilizamos Siteground, porque nos da flexibilidad, rapidez en el servidor y rapidez en el servicio. Habiendo probado muuuuchas otras opciones, nos quedamos con Siteground, porque por muy poco más, obtienes mucha más calidad y tranquilidad. Haz click aquí para obtener un 60% de descuento al contratar tu servidor Siteground: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/siteground _______________ Esta es nuestra página oficial de Facebook: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/facebook Nuestro grupo de Retos para emprendedores: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/retos Además, recuerda que puedes suscribirte al podcast en: - Nuestra página: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/feed/podcast - iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/libros-para-emprendedores/id1076142249?l=es - Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/LibrosparaemprendedoresNet - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qXuVDCYF8HvkEynJwHULb - iVoox: http://www.ivoox.com/ajx-suscribirse_jh_266011_1.html - Spreaker: http://www.spreaker.com/user/8567017/episodes/feed - Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=81214 y seguirnos en Twitter ( https://twitter.com/EmprendeLibros ) y en Facebook (
The Sweet Adversity Podcast: Entrepreneurship/Adversity/Lifestyle
In this episode, I interview Alexander Osterwalder, Founder of Strategyzer.com and Co-Creator of Business Model Generation. He talks about about process over outcome, and how he approaches complex problems and makes them simple. Guest Bio: Alexander Osterwalder is an entrepreneur, speaker and business model innovator. Together with Professor Yves Pigneur he invented the Business Model… The post SA 019: Alexander Osterwalder, Founder of Strategyzer.com and the Business Model Canvas appeared first on Nick Dinardo.
This episode is with Bessi Graham, CEO and Co-founder of The Difference Incubator (TDi) out of Melbourne, Australia. TDi is developing investment-ready enterprises that create positive social impact and are financially sustainable. This initiative will alter the social economy of Australia and open a new market for impact investors. By focusing on coaching, clinics, consultation and incubation - TDi is applying the principles of Business Model Generation when working with social enterprises to develop innovative business models that will help entrepreneurs build companies that have lasting durability in their pursuit of Blended Value. TDi is also bridging the gap between impact investors and startups by bringing investors to the table and looking at business creation through an investor's lense to help bring suitable dealflow to the areas impact focused investors. If you want to learn more about the power of coming up with new business models for social enterprise, or want to learn more about what to look for when conducting due dillegence on a potential impact investment, this is a great episode for you. And as a bonus - you'll also finally learn what the difference is between and incubator and an accelerator program! www.tdi.org.au Twitter @difincubator / @BessiGraham Facebook: The Difference Incubator Linkedin: Bessi Graham www.impactinvestingpodcast.com Twitter: @impinvpodcast Facebook: The Impact Investing Podcast
Bill Bartmann Founder and CEO of CFS2 and an aggressive advocate for reform of the debt-collection industry, said, “I am convinced we are on the right track to reforming an industry of rampant abuse and Governor Henry will play a big role in helping to deliver our message to regulators and capital sources. His commitment to be a part of our company is proof of his belief that what we are doing is important and that we have the ability to change millions of lives Brooke Lively President of Cathedral Capital, Inc., where she functions as a financial consultant specializing in closely held companies with revenues up to 10 million dollars. She advises firms to help them make the strategic financial decisions necessary to grow their businesses Kirk Chisholm has been a licensed investment advisor and wealth manager for 16 years. He has successfully managed portfolios over 2 full market cycles. He has been providing wealth management services to individuals, executives, entrepreneurs, and their families, as well as businesses and organizations Patrick van der Pijl CEO & Strategy Designer at Business Models Inc. and producer of the worldwide bestseller Business Model Generation. He helped Board of Directors, Top Leaders and Innovation Teams of more than 300 (international) organizations to innovate their business model and design a future strategy. He is an international keynote speaker and frequently delivers speeches and workshops at innovation events worldwide
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