Podcasts about Osterwalder

Der als «Babyquäler» bekannt gewordene Straftäter René Osterwalder ist im Gefängnis Pöschwies in Regensdorf gestorben. Er nahm sich Mitte April mit Hilfe einer Sterbehilfeorganisation das Leben. Osterwalder quälte und missbrauchte in den 90er-Jahren mehrere Kinder. Die weiteren Themen: · Beat Habegger von der FDP ist neuer Kantonsratspräsident. · Schaffhausen führt Patrouillendienst gegen junge Vandalen ein. · Beim Untergang der Titanic im Jahr 1912 kam auch ein Landwirt aus Zürich ums Leben.

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.

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.

Mike and Alex explore key questions around the innovation mindset and framework. What is required of leadership, how to properly test your ideas, and most importantly how to inject the "Dual Mindset" into your organization! Thank you for listening to the Leaders, Innovators and Big Ideas podcast, supported by Rainforest Alberta. The podcast that highlights those people who are contributing to and/or supporting the innovation ecosystem in Alberta. Host:  Mike Procee is an entrepreneur, facilitator, innovator and problem solver. Working in the Calgary Energy Sector, Mike strives to build the innovation ecosystem and community. From his volunteer position on the Strategic Capability Network, where he founded the Calgary Innovation Peer Forum, to pursuing his DBA in Winter 2024, focused on innovation, Mike is pushing the thinking on what it means to be a corporate innovation practitioner.  Guest: Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is the founder & CEO of Strategyzer and visiting professor at IMD Business School. He is ranked no. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide.  Dr. Osterwalder is best known for inventing the Business Model Canvas together with Yves Pigneur. He wrote 5 global bestsellers and 1 business comic for kids. Strategyzer, his company, helps leading organizations around the world innovate and transform.   Please be sure to share this episode with everyone you know. If you are interested in being either a host, a guest, or a sponsor of the show, please reach out. We are published in Google Podcasts and the iTunes store for Apple Podcasts We would be grateful if you could give us a rating as it helps spread the word about the show. Show Links: Strategyzer AG  Show Quotes: "Do not call yourself rebels or pirates if you are innovating!" "Innovation is creating value for the business, customers, employees, and stakeholders" "A great R&D program does not mean you are a great innovator!" Credits... This Episode Sponsored By: New Idea Machine Episode Music: Tony Del Degan Creator & Producer: Al Del Degan  

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.

El Secretario adjunto de AJB Lomas nos habló sobre pedido de reapertura de paritarias de los trabajadores judiciales.

In dieser Folge geht um die Frage, wie Unternehmen die Ambidextrie erfolgreich managen können. Und darüber haben wir mit Dr. Alexander Osterwalder gesprochen. Er ist Miterfinder des Business Modell Canvas und CEO der Beratungsfirma Strategyzer. Zu Beginn der Folge sprechen wir über Geschäftsmodellinnovationen. Alexander erklärt, wie der über den Business Modell Canvas zum portfoliobasierten Innovationsansatz gekommen ist. Mit welchen Tools Unternehmen die Ambidextrie besser managen können, das zeigt Alexander im Mittelteil der Folge. Anhand der Explore- und Exploit-Logik verdeutlicht er, dass Führungskräfte in zwei unterschiedlichen Bereichen denken müssen. Diese bewusste Trennung geschieht aus seiner Sicht noch viel zu selten. Im letzten Teil der Folge gehen wir auf die Innovationskultur ein. Wer erfahren will, was erfolgreiche Innovationsteams ausmacht und wie die Erfolge gemessen werden können, der hört die Folge am besten bis zum Ende. Kontaktiert Alexander Osterwalder unter: alex@strategyzer.com Erstelle dir deinen eigenen Trendradar im Trendmanager: https://www.trendmanager.com/de/testen/ Meldet euch für unseren Newsletter an https://www.trendone.com/newsletter Die Hosts: Peter von Aspern https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-von-aspern Sebastian Metzner https:/www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianmetzner Sendet uns gern eine Whatsapp Sprachnachricht an: +49 172 67 82 736 Schreibt uns Feedback per Mail an: podcast@trendone.com

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

Recursos emprendimiento y lean startup: 🎓 Curso Lean Startup Innokabi 👉 [https://cursoleanstartup.innokabi.com/] 💌 Suscripción Newsletter Innokabi 👉 https://innokabi.com/ PATROCINADOR: 👉 MailingYa! Tu agencia de Email Marketing para eCommerce ► https://www.mailingya.com/ ▬▬▬▬ INFO GENERAL ▬▬▬▬▬ ► DESCRIPCIÓN: Me alegro que hayas decidido acompañarnos una semana más en el podcast de Innokabi. Soy Alfonso Prim y quiero ayudarte a lanzar tu marca, producto o servicio con éxito empleando lean startup y las herramientas de marketing online más interesantes y experiencias de otros emprendedores que ya lo han conseguido. ▬▬▬▬▬ CONTENIDO ▬▬▬▬▬ ► DESCRIPCIÓN EPISODIO: Hoy hablamos con Jose Antonio de Miguel (Yoemprendo), referente en el mundo del emprendimiento, del lean startup, de las metodologías ágiles, del intraemprendimiento y cuya misión es hackear organizaciones para ayudarles a crear un valor excepcional en un entorno complejo. Jose Antonio ha sido responsable de edición, revisión y redacción de prólogos de varios de los libros y autores más importantes del panorama internacional sobre emprendimiento, lean startup y metodologías ágiles. Solo dos ejemplos: el método Lean Startup de Eric Ries (edición 17) y Diseñando la propuesta de valor de Osterwalder. Así que hoy, con Jose Antonio, hablaremos de emprendimiento, de lean startup, de hackear organizaciones, de metodologías para lanzar negocios y unas cuantas cosas más que estoy seguro de que te darán un montón de ideas para aplicar a tu negocio. ► PREGUNTAS: 1. ¿Quién eres para los que no te conocen y cuál es (brevemente) tu trayectoria hasta llegar a hoy? y luego entramos al detalle. 2. Cómo ves el mundo del emprendimiento y el mundo empresarial actualmente. 3. Qué son y qué aportan las metodologías ágiles y lean startup a emprendedores. 4. Qué aportan este tipo de metodologías a empresas ya consolidadas. 5. Hackear organizaciones, qué es y en qué consiste. 6. Cómo analizar el valor que aporta una organización y cómo identificar retos. 7. Importancia del compromiso de la dirección y cómo generar compromiso en el resto de la organización. 8. Cómo es tu método para trabajar con clientes. Puedes ponernos algún ejemplo. 9. Intraemprendimiento, cómo trabajar proyectos de intraemprendimiento en empresas. 10. Diseño de la propuesta de valor, consejos para crearla. 11. Cómo diseñar el futuro de una empresa, innovaciones, etc. 12. Cómo rediseñar el modelo de negocio de una empresa. 13. Cómo conviven el modelo de negocio actual y las innovaciones futuras de ese modelo de negocio. Ejemplos y recomendaciones. 14. Probar, testear, experimentar en grandes empresas, cómo se plantea y cómo se lleva a cabo. 15. Algún consejo para crear prototipos de ideas de negocio o de nuevas líneas de negocio. 16. Qué supone para ti participar en la revisión, prólogos y ediciones de algunos de los libros más importantes de emprendimiento actuales. ▬▬▬▬ REFERENCIAS Y ENLACES ▬▬▬▬ Dónde encontramos a Jose Antonio: ► Correo ► yoemprendo.contacto@gmail.com ► Twitter ► @yoemprendo Recomendaciones: ► Serie (Amazon Prime) ► "El consultor" ► Serie HBO sobre Theranos ► "The inventor" ► Podcast ► "3 cisnes negros" ▬▬▬▬ INFO GENERAL ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Si te gusta el Podcast de Innokabi por favor no olvides darle al ME GUSTA, dejarme un comentario en tu plataforma de podcasts favorita, y registrarte en la newsletter de Innokabi donde comparto experiencias, ideas de negocio y consejos sobre emprendimiento y marketing online: 🎓 BLOG INNOKABI 👉 [https://www.innokabi.com/blog/] Para que pueda enviarte más contenidos, recursos y formación sobre emprendimiento, lean startup y marketing online.

Boyan Slat is zonder twijfel één van de helden van het land. Slat is oprichter en boegbeeld van The Ocean Cleanup. Het woest ambitieuze project om de oceanen van deze wereld te ontdoen van alle plastic rotzooi. Remy Gieling stelt zelfs dat Slat ‘De Nederlandse Musk' is. Hoewel hij een totaal andere communicatiestijl heeft, heeft Remy een punt. Slat is een intens gedreven probleemoplosser-op-een missie. In deze speciale aflevering van DenkTank bespreken Remy en Hans Janssen de hoogtepunten uit het optreden van Boyan Slat op Amsterdam Business Forum:Hoe gaat het eigenlijk met The Ocean Cleanup?Hoe gaat Slat om met situaties waarin er iets mislukt of zwaar tegenvalt?Hoe zorgt Boyan met zijn team ook de de toevoer van plastic naar Oceanen wordt gestopt? Wat kunnen leiders en ondernemers leren van Boyan's ondernemers- en levenswijsheden? Hoe verbinden de ervaringen van Slat met de conceptuele lessen van experts als Osterwalder, Collins en Edmondson? Een kwetsbaar, openhartig verhaal van een spreker die misschien geen podiumtijger is, maar op velen diepe indruk maakte met het doorkijkje in zijn ziel. Notes:De trashfence uit GuatamalaSite van The Ocean CleanupMooiste clips van The Ocean Cleanup vind je hier.

"Zwei europäische Schriftstellerinnen, eine Illustratorin und Animationskünstlerin. Ihre drei Bücher tangieren auf unterschiedliche Weise Fragen des Humors und der Komik," heißt es im Programmheft der Europäischen Literaturtage, die im November 2022 in Krems stattgefunden haben. Wir durften für unseren Büchertalk in diesem Jahr Barbi Markovic mit ihrem Roman “Die verschissene Zeit” (Residenz), Ivana Gibová mit ihrem Buch “Barbora, Himmelherrgott und Katharis” (Drava) und Pascale Osterwalder mit ihren Seifenspender-Comics "Daily Soap" (Luftschacht Verlag) begrüßen.

In deze DenkTank special podcast bespreken Remy Gieling en Hans Janssen de beste inzichten uit Osterwalders presentaties én hoor je de mooiste momenten van Osterwalder op Main Stage. De Zwitserse innovatiespecialist Alex Osterwalder was voor velen dé verrassing van Amsterdam Business Forum 2022. Hij combineerde frisse ideeën met een heerlijk provocatieve stijl. Osterwalder is de uitvinder van één van de meest gebruikte tools voor innovatie: het Business Model Canvas. Dat hij daarachter zit, is geen toeval: Osterwalder bedenkt aan de lopende band slimme tools die ondernemers en leiders helpen om hun organisatie innovatiever te maken.In deze podcast:Nemen Remy en Hans je mee langs de beste inzichten uit Alex's talksVertelt Osterwalder welke drie elementen nodig zijn om je organisatie onoverwinnelijk te maken.Waarschuwt hij voor de gevaren van het flink investeren in je innovaties.Geeft hij drie kritische vragen die je kunt stellen om te kijken of je innovatie écht serieus neemt.Veegt hij de vloer aan met 3 populaire managementtools: het businessplan, de MVP en het interview.Remy Gieling en Hans Janssen kijken terug op Amsterdam Business Forum aan de hand van deze mooie fragmenten van ‘Alex Osterwalder in actie'. Noot: waar we niet opkwamen in het gesprek was: https://www.liveondemand.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 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.

El Secretario adjunto de Ajb Lomas nos habló sobre el pedido de renuncia de los trabajadores judiciales al procurador Conte Grand.

Recently we've had the great pleasure of chatting with Miguel Dias, who has 30 years of experience, with more than 10 in the industry leading R&D and Business Development. Miguel is a founder of BIX Citizen a Cloud Service Provider of Home Telehealth and Business Developer of Indicio Solutions, a B2B Cloud Service Provider of Spoken Communication, Data Communication Intelligence and Big Data Analytics. Currently, he's an Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Sciences and Information Technology at ISCTE University in Lisbon, teaching graduate courses in Computer Graphics and Virtual and Augmented Reality. Timenotes: [15:00] How did he get into the early field of computer graphics [22:20] Talking about 3D rendering libraries and VHS clips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu2zF-us8TE [31:00] Early 1990s at the forefront of the TransEuropean networks IP on top of ATM [35:40] 1998 - guided a bunch of students from ETI 1998, to work on AR /VR projects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CVi6qNa2d0 [38:40] 11 years at Microsoft [48:30] How to disrupt a public agency with the power of tools like design thinking, service design, and business model generation [55:30] Computers Graphics challenges in University [01:07:00] Books recommendations Books Recommendation: - People Management:

In questo episodio i ragazzi raccontano esperienze personali ed aspettative rispetto all'educazione sessuale, nella creazione del loro bagaglio di informazioni e di un'idea sensata e responsabile di sessualità. Un focus del talk è incentrato sull' educazione affettiva e sessuale nelle scuole ticinesi, con la partecipazione del presidente della CEAS Nicolò Osterwalder.#educazionesessuale #sexeducation #sessualità #scuola #educazione #sexboxpodcast

El Secretario adjunto de la AJB de Lomas de Zamora nos habló sobre la lista de unidad para definir las autoridades departamentales.

Am 15. Oktober findet live in Luzern ein Einführungstag zum Thema Facilitating statt, wo ich gemeinsam mit meinem heutigen Interviewpartner – Daniel Osterwalder – auftreten und sprechen werde. Daniel ist der einzige zertifizierte „Professional Facilitator“ in der Schweiz und wer, wenn nicht er, könnte besser erklären, was es mit Failitating auf sich hat? In dieser Folge spricht Daniel über die groben Inhalte zum Facilitating, was es genau bedeutet und wie es angewandt wird. Wenn du live beim Einführungstag in Luzern dabei sein magst? Dann schreib doch gern eine Mail für weitere Infos an Daniel - nutze hierfür seine Mailadresse daniel.osterwalder@visualdynamics.ch . Oder kontaktiere auch gern mich unter mail@crelution.ch. Wir freuen uns über zahlreiche Teilnehmer! Du kannst dich aber auch sehr gern direkt über diesen Link für den Kennlern-Workshop zum Thema Facilitating live in Luzern anmelden. Vergiss nicht: Über deinen Besuch auf meiner Website würde ich mich sehr freune! Dort findest du alles zu mir und meiner Arbeit. Weitere Infos zu meinem absoluten Herzensprojekt - das 1:1 Mentoring für Führungskräfte, die ihr Team gern intuitiv und erfolgreich führen wollen - findest du hier. Abonniere gern meinen Kanal auf LinkedIn! Dort wirst du zwischen den einzelnen Folgen mit weiterem wertvollem Content versorgt. Ich würde mich freuen, wenn du auch meinen Podcast bei Apple Podcast, Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music und Co. abonnierst. Vielen Dank! Vorfreudige Grüsse, deine Sonja.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element. David and I talk about what keeps ideas from gaining traction and what you can do to avoid friction and resistance to new ideas. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and Coauthor of The Human ElementBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have David Schonthal. He is a Clinical Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas. Welcome to the show, David. David Schonthal: Thanks, Brian. Nice to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you here. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and watching what it takes to make new ideas happen. You've spent time at IDEO. You were co-founder of Matter, which is that 25,000 square foot innovation center in Chicago. Has some venture capital experience and that. And I thought we could start by telling the audience how you got into the innovation space in the first place. David Schonthal: By accident is the answer. It's sort of a long story, but I wound up becoming the COO of a medical device company in San Diego, California based on a radical shift from what I was doing before, which is tax software in London. To make a long story short, one of my former bosses called me up when I was just at my lowest point with tax and the UK, no offense to the UK, but it was winter, and it was like dark 18 hours out of the day. And he called me up and all of a sudden, I just, all I remember is him saying, yada, yada, yada San Diego, yada yada, yada. I was like, oh please.He's like, would you like to know what the business is? I was like, no, not important. So, I wound up going and being the head of operations for an early stage medical device company. And then basically from that point forward was just bit with the bug around bringing new ideas to market either in the startup space, through entrepreneurship or venture capital or in the corporate space through design and innovation.Brian Ardinger: And you've got a new book called the Human Element. I would imagine it packs a lot about the things that you've learned over that career. Since you've spent a lot of time seeing how early ideas get traction or not, what is the most striking problem that you see most people making when it comes to kicking off an idea?David Schonthal: I think maybe the best place to start is by most innovators and entrepreneurs' instinct that the idea is the thing that needs to be addressed. So, if a new product or service or strategy isn't being adopted by the market, most innovators instincts says well, let's make the product a little better. Let's change the way we talk about it. Let's drop the price. Let's promote it differently. And they make the thing or the strategy or the movement, the center of their attention. And in the course of my career, I've worked on some really amazing, I mean, some terrible, but also some really amazing innovations and products and services. And I was always surprised by how, even though clearly if these things were adopted into the market, they would make the world a better place, no matter how much we tweaked or change the idea that wasn't always the key to success of getting it introduced.And so about four years ago, turned my attention to thinking about what is it that stands in the way of change and partnered up with one of my colleagues at Kellogg, who was a behavioral psychologist named Loran Nordgren. And together we've been studying this problem from both the applied side, as well as the theoretical side.And that was the genesis of the book, which is that our instincts about innovation are too heavily biased on making the thing more appealing and not focused enough on helping the market adopt it by removing the friction that stands in the way. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that. You kind of start off the book, this battle between what do you call fuel and friction. The idea that a lot of times, just to make an idea better, all you have to do is add more facts or more features or try to get more folks bought into it. But really, it's a lot about how do you eliminate the frictions around that? So, in the book you talk about four frictions. Let's outline and tell the audience how they can avoid them.David Schonthal: Sure. So, if you think about a new idea, like an airplane leaving the ground or a projectile flying through the air. Fuel, to your point Brian, are all of the things that propel that idea forward. The need that the customer has, features and benefits, promotional strategies, but like an airplane leaving the ground there are also forces that stand in the way, whether it's wind resistance or sheer or gravity. And so, the book is really focused on these forces, these headwinds of innovation and the four that we specify in the book, the four frictions, our number one inertia, which is our desire as human beings to tend to stick with the status quo. Despite the fact that we know the status quo might be imperfect, our habits are surprisingly powerful. And so, recognizing that inertia is a play anytime you're trying to get somebody to change from what they're doing today, to what you'd like them to do tomorrow. Effort is the second one. All of the ambiguity, all of the costliness, all of the exertion required to get somebody to make that change. The third friction is emotion. All of the anxiety and fear that comes along with changing from something that you do today to something you do tomorrow. And you might not think that emotion comes into play for small things, but emotion comes into play when you're buying a pack of gum or when you're putting on a new shirt.And then the fourth is what we call reactants, which is people's aversion to being changed by others. And each of them show up in varying degrees, depending on what you're working on in spotting them appropriately forecasting them ideally, so that they can be muted and mitigated is really the key. Brian Ardinger: And a lot of those frictions, they're almost not necessarily irrational, but they're definitely not something that you can take an economic model and say, well, clearly there's a cost benefit analysis and everybody should end up on this side of it because of the cost benefit analysis. But there's a lot of underlying things. And it seems a lot of this frictions around ambiguity or being comfortable with failure. How can you get folks more comfortable with that environment of ambiguity? David Schonthal: There's a couple of things that are packed into that question. Number one, ambiguity maps to the friction of effort. Effort we assume is like exertion, which is how much time and money will it take me to make a change. But you're pointing out appropriately that the other way effort comes in is ambiguity or a lack of clarity about how to go about doing something.And sometimes that ambiguity can be so overwhelming that people are afraid to get started because they don't necessarily know how to get started. We talk in the book about a couple of methodologies specifically around helping people with ambiguity. One is around road mapping in simplification. Oftentimes our desire to get people to change is to like keep adding or keep making something better, add facts or add arguments to get somebody to change from what they're doing, to what you'd like them to doing.I mean, just look at vaccines. For example, in the states. Like there's no ambiguity about the evidence that vaccines help protect against severe illness. There is no ambiguity. There is no doubting, the fact that if you get vaccinated, it will make the world a safer place. But that doesn't stop people from having resistance to that idea.And one thing might be around the ambiguity about how to go about getting a vaccine. One might be around the perceived effort of getting a vaccine. The fear about getting a vaccine. And so understanding why people do or don't do the things that they do is really the key to addressing it. So simplification, streamlining, making unfamiliar ideas more familiar. Oftentimes innovators have this instinct that because their idea is new and radical. We need to highlight its newness and its radicalness is part of its allure. Oftentimes that actually works against us because the newer and more radical something seems the less familiar it is. And the more anxiety we have about how we're going to start to use it. And the great example of that comes from Apple. And if you're old enough audience to remember the introduction of the Macintosh OS. In addition to creating a new machine, one of the things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created was a created was a new operating system for how computers are used. And unlike PCs or DOS-based systems, which you really needed to learn the language of computers in order to do something on a computer, Steve Jobs and other great innovators tend to have their products and services operate the way the rest of your world works.So, when you're working on an Apple home screen, you're working on a desktop. And when you're creating a document and you want to store that document, you put that document in a folder. And when you want to get rid of it, you drag it into the trashcan. And these might seem sort of like cute user interface principles, but these were deliberately designed to make something wildly unfamiliar to people who had never worked on a computer to immediately feel more comfortable with it because it works, sounds, and it feels the way the rest of your world works. So even though something is new, doesn't mean that it should be projected as radically.Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm a new innovator or I'm a startup entrepreneur, I've got a new idea I want to start building that out. Do you recommend mapping out these particular frictions or how do you find out what your audience or what your customers are fearful about? David Schonthal: That's a great question. There are a couple of tools we bring to life in the book. One is called a Friction Map, which is anticipating the frictions that might stand in the way of your new ideas. So, it is a document that you can fill out with your team. Where you forecast based on some clear questions that are asked in the Map. What is the relevance? What is the amount of inertia that might be present? What's the amount of effort, friction that might be present? Emotional friction that might be present in reactants? And then there's another framework around remedies. How might you take each of these frictions, test them in the market, but also test possible remedies to overcome. And the more you can bring this into your design process.So, people will fill out a Business Model Canvas based on Osterwalder's work, or they'll fill out a Horizons Framework as they're forecasting what opportunities might exist. We also recommend filling out a Friction Map, which is what are the forces of resistance that might stand in the way. And what might we prototype to overcome those forces as a way of introducing this product or service or strategy.Brian Ardinger: And then do you go out and actually test those assumptions? David Schonthal: Absolutely. Each of them can be prototyped. And yes, testing them with different audiences, testing different ways of communicating or making unfamiliar things familiar. Or identifying the sources of emotional friction so that they can be addressed in the messaging, and the way products are communicated. All are easy enough to test in low fidelity and oftentimes save us a lot of effort down the road when it comes to scaling offers up. Brian Ardinger: One of the other things I liked about the book is that you have not only these frameworks, that people can understand the methodology and that around it, but you also bring out some case studies in the book. And one of them is around Flyhomes, which is a startup company that built a new business model in the real estate space, designed to address some of the frictions in the market. So, can you talk a little bit about that case study? David Schonthal: It's a great story. So Flyhomes, for those of you who are living in the United States while you're watching this can appreciate, we are in the midst of a bananas housing market, residential housing market. Debt has never been cheaper. Inventory has never been lower. And as a result, desirable homes are just flying off the market almost the same day that they're listed, which creates a whole conundrum for people who are trying to buy homes, particularly first-time home buyers. Because when inventory is low, typically the offers that get accepted by sellers, particularly when they have multiple offers, are all cash offers or offers that are perceived to be low risk. And low risk offers are ones that don't have contingencies attached to them. Don't have home sale contingencies. Don't have loan contingencies. In order to compete, in order to get a home buyer, you have to either bring all cash to the table or convince sellers that despite the fact that they've got these contingencies, that there's actually a high degree of certainty, that something will close.Flyhomes is a business that helps address this problem by making all buyers, all cash buyers, they have focused their business model on removing the friction that stands in the way of somebody buying a home in simultaneously removing the friction that stands in the way of a seller accepting the new one offer forum.They didn't start this way. Flyhomes began, in fact, the namesake doesn't come from homes flying off the market. It came from the fact that Stephen Lane and Tushar Garg who were young entrepreneurs, started the business by thinking, all right, in the world of real estate tech, in the world of residential real estate tech, the big names or the new market innovations where things like Trulia and Zillow and Redfin, that had two primary value propositions.One we're either going to take all home inventory off the MLS that exists only for real estate agents, and we're going to democratize it and make it so that anybody who's interested in looking at homes can see all available inventory, which is great. And then the second thing they typically did was discount brokerage. Meaning that if you worked with one of their agents, you would get cash back, they would discount their service fee and you would get some of that back in a rebate. And Steve and Tushar figured there was probably more that could be done in this market. And they being millennials themselves in doing some research, found that millennials, in addition to wanting to own homes, also desired travel, adventure, freedom.And why is it that when we make big purchases on electronics or appliances on a credit card, we get all the benefits that come with a credit card, like points and travel miles. Why don't we get something like that with homes? And so, they created a product called Flyhomes, which is for every dollar you spend on the purchase of a new home, up into a half a million dollars, you would get points on an airline.And they partnered with Alaska and Jet Blue. And Jet Blue actually sent out this mass email to all their frequent flyers saying we're now in this arrangement with Flyhomes, buy a home through Flyhomes get up to 500,000 frequent flyer miles on Jet Blue. In the first day, thousands of people signed up for the platform.And Steve and Tushar looked at themselves like this is going to be huge. And then nothing. Like nothing happened. Nobody was buying a home through Flyhomes. Nobody was actually using the service. There was enough alure or to the idea that got people interested to like check it out and sign up. But that wasn't actually helping people make the progress. They really wanted to make, which wasn't getting 500,000 airline points. It was actually getting the home that they wanted. Flyhomes could address the real problem or address the real progress. All of these bells and whistles wouldn't make things easier. It would just be bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles.So almost at the point of going out of business, they decided to pivot. And because they both had their real estate license started selling real estate. And by studying people in this kind of ethnographic way and actually getting out and selling real estate as realtors, they understood that the problem wasn't the points in adventure.The problem was is that people desired homes in competitive markets that they were unable to access. And after two or three chances of putting in bids and having those bids rejected, people were just giving up on real estate all together. And so Steve and Tushar decided that if they could help address the problem of democratizing the ability for home buyers to buy homes in really competitive markets, that would be a revolutionary change. That would really change the game. And so, they pivoted over from points to friction removal. And today. Flyhomes is growing like crazy. They do billions of dollars a year in transactions. They just raised a really big Series C at $150 million. It's all because they changed their business model from fuel addition to friction removal.Brian Ardinger: Excellent example. Now you've got a number of them in the book and that. What other hidden gems in the book that people should be excited about when they pick it up? David Schonthal: I think the most interesting stories and we try to have as many of them as possible in the book, so the ones that are counterintuitive. Like the ones that really check our biases and our assumptions about what we think the right way to do something is relative to what the science and the data tells us. And one of the things that I think readers who read this book will find is that in many cases, our instincts about what we ought to do to affect change are actually in some ways the opposite of what we ought to do to impact change.And we actually start the book off with a really fun story about the world's most successful car salesperson. A guy named Ali Reda, who works in suburban Detroit, in Dearborn, Michigan. Who outsells every other average car dealer in the United States, by a factor of 12 to one. He single-handedly sells as many as 1500 cars a year, which is more than most dealerships sell in total.And when you study Ali, and when you interview him and when you understand how he approaches car sales, that is so much different than his peers, what you learn is that he just frames his job radically different than every other salesperson. And I won't divulge too much about the secrets of how, but there's lots of examples in this book about how people who go left when everybody else goes right. And to succeed, but it's not just that they go left, it's understanding the psychology of what it is that they're doing differently than enables them to experience that success. Which is really, I think the beautiful thing about partnering with Loren on this is not only do we have examples about how these things work in practice, but we can also help people understand why they work psychologically.Brian Ardinger: So, you've been in this innovation industry for quite a long time. What are some of the biggest changes that you've come across and how do you see the innovation space kind of evolving? David Schonthal: That is a, the ability for people to create new ideas and make them real has never been easier. The cost of starting a new business, the cost of creating a new product or service with digital technology has enabled everybody who once had an idea on a napkin sketch.You now have the ability to make that sketch into something real and tangible and available in the market. And what I find now is, we've got a different problem, which is that the world is flooded with new ideas and flooded with new technologies. And whereas before it used to be hard to make an idea into a real thing. Now it's getting people to notice and pay attention and actually adopt your real thing. And one of the ways that we think about doing it is spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising and SEO and SEM. And yes, that's part of building awareness. But we don't often think about awareness as being one side of the equation. The other side is how do you make it easy for people to say yes. Well, one of the things we noticed about new products and services, particularly when you're creating a new consumer product is people will learn about it. They'll even go to the website, they'll put it in their cart, but at the moment before they check out, they'll abandon their cart, which means you've done half the job, right.You've gotten them interested to come to the site at the beginning. You've gotten them interested enough in the features and benefits to actually add that, or imagine that in their lives, but something is holding them back from actually pulling the trigger. And I think, now we've created a world where making the idea come to life has never been easier. But how do we make sure that it's easy for people to adopt that into their lives so that they can say yes, and to get noticed in that way. It's no longer about features and benefits. Now it's just about making things as frictionless and as effortless as possible for people to adopt. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: And the great thing about that is that's becoming easier as well. And people like yourself are helping in that process. So, David, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit about some of the secret sauce behind all that. I encourage people to pick up The Human Element. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? David Schonthal: HumanElementBook.com is a landing page that shares information about the book. You can find me on the Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management faculty page, just Google my name, David Schonthal. And usually, you can find me there and I'd love to hear from you. Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you David, for being on the show and look forward to continuing the conversation as the years and the innovation evolve. David Schonthal: Thanks Brian. Me too. It was great to be here. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the Kellogg School of Management and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. David and I talk about what keeps ideas from gaining traction and what you can do to avoid friction and resistance to new ideas. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of The Human ElementBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have David Schonthal. He is a Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas. Welcome to the show, David. David Schonthal: Thanks, Brian. Nice to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you here. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and watching what it takes to make new ideas happen. You've spent time at IDEO. You were co-founder of Matter, which is that 25,000 square foot innovation center in Chicago. Has some venture capital experience and that. And I thought we could start by telling the audience how you got into the innovation space in the first place. David Schonthal: By accident is the answer. It's sort of a long story, but I wound up becoming the COO of a medical device company in San Diego, California based on a radical shift from what I was doing before, which is tax software in London. To make a long story short, one of my former bosses called me up when I was just at my lowest point with tax and the UK, no offense to the UK, but it was winter, and it was like dark 18 hours out of the day. And he called me up and all of a sudden, I just, all I remember is him saying, yada, yada, yada San Diego, yada yada, yada. I was like, oh please.He's like, would you like to know what the business is? I was like, no, not important. So, I wound up going and being the head of operations for an early stage medical device company. And then basically from that point forward was just bit with the bug around bringing new ideas to market either in the startup space, through entrepreneurship or venture capital or in the corporate space through design and innovation.Brian Ardinger: And you've got a new book called the Human Element. I would imagine it packs a lot about the things that you've learned over that career. Since you've spent a lot of time seeing how early ideas get traction or not, what is the most striking problem that you see most people making when it comes to kicking off an idea?David Schonthal: I think maybe the best place to start is by most innovators and entrepreneurs' instinct that the idea is the thing that needs to be addressed. So, if a new product or service or strategy isn't being adopted by the market, most innovators instincts says well, let's make the product a little better. Let's change the way we talk about it. Let's drop the price. Let's promote it differently. And they make the thing or the strategy or the movement, the center of their attention. And in the course of my career, I've worked on some really amazing, I mean, some terrible, but also some really amazing innovations and products and services. And I was always surprised by how, even though clearly if these things were adopted into the market, they would make the world a better place, no matter how much we tweaked or change the idea that wasn't always the key to success of getting it introduced.And so about four years ago, turned my attention to thinking about what is it that stands in the way of change and partnered up with one of my colleagues at Kellogg, who was a behavioral psychologist named Loran Nordgren. And together we've been studying this problem from both the applied side, as well as the theoretical side.And that was the genesis of the book, which is that our instincts about innovation are too heavily biased on making the thing more appealing and not focused enough on helping the market adopt it by removing the friction that stands in the way. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that. You kind of start off the book, this battle between what do you call fuel and friction. The idea that a lot of times, just to make an idea better, all you have to do is add more facts or more features or try to get more folks bought into it. But really, it's a lot about how do you eliminate the frictions around that? So, in the book you talk about four frictions. Let's outline and tell the audience how they can avoid them.David Schonthal: Sure. So, if you think about a new idea, like an airplane leaving the ground or a projectile flying through the air. Fuel, to your point Brian, are all of the things that propel that idea forward. The need that the customer has, features and benefits, promotional strategies, but like an airplane leaving the ground there are also forces that stand in the way, whether it's wind resistance or sheer or gravity. And so, the book is really focused on these forces, these headwinds of innovation and the four that we specify in the book, the four frictions, our number one inertia, which is our desire as human beings to tend to stick with the status quo. Despite the fact that we know the status quo might be imperfect, our habits are surprisingly powerful. And so, recognizing that inertia is a play anytime you're trying to get somebody to change from what they're doing today, to what you'd like them to do tomorrow. Effort is the second one. All of the ambiguity, all of the costliness, all of the exertion required to get somebody to make that change. The third friction is emotion. All of the anxiety and fear that comes along with changing from something that you do today to something you do tomorrow. And you might not think that emotion comes into play for small things, but emotion comes into play when you're buying a pack of gum or when you're putting on a new shirt.And then the fourth is what we call reactants, which is people's aversion to being changed by others. And each of them show up in varying degrees, depending on what you're working on in spotting them appropriately forecasting them ideally, so that they can be muted and mitigated is really the key. Brian Ardinger: And a lot of those frictions, they're almost not necessarily irrational, but they're definitely not something that you can take an economic model and say, well, clearly there's a cost benefit analysis and everybody should end up on this side of it because of the cost benefit analysis. But there's a lot of underlying things. And it seems a lot of this frictions around ambiguity or being comfortable with failure. How can you get folks more comfortable with that environment of ambiguity? David Schonthal: There's a couple of things that are packed into that question. Number one, ambiguity maps to the friction of effort. Effort we assume is like exertion, which is how much time and money will it take me to make a change. But you're pointing out appropriately that the other way effort comes in is ambiguity or a lack of clarity about how to go about doing something.And sometimes that ambiguity can be so overwhelming that people are afraid to get started because they don't necessarily know how to get started. We talk in the book about a couple of methodologies specifically around helping people with ambiguity. One is around road mapping in simplification. Oftentimes our desire to get people to change is to like keep adding or keep making something better, add facts or add arguments to get somebody to change from what they're doing, to what you'd like them to doing.I mean, just look at vaccines. For example, in the states. Like there's no ambiguity about the evidence that vaccines help protect against severe illness. There is no ambiguity. There is no doubting, the fact that if you get vaccinated, it will make the world a safer place. But that doesn't stop people from having resistance to that idea.And one thing might be around the ambiguity about how to go about getting a vaccine. One might be around the perceived effort of getting a vaccine. The fear about getting a vaccine. And so understanding why people do or don't do the things that they do is really the key to addressing it. So simplification, streamlining, making unfamiliar ideas more familiar. Oftentimes innovators have this instinct that because their idea is new and radical. We need to highlight its newness and its radicalness is part of its allure. Oftentimes that actually works against us because the newer and more radical something seems the less familiar it is. And the more anxiety we have about how we're going to start to use it. And the great example of that comes from Apple. And if you're old enough audience to remember the introduction of the Macintosh OS. In addition to creating a new machine, one of the things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created was a created was a new operating system for how computers are used. And unlike PCs or DOS-based systems, which you really needed to learn the language of computers in order to do something on a computer, Steve Jobs and other great innovators tend to have their products and services operate the way the rest of your world works.So, when you're working on an Apple home screen, you're working on a desktop. And when you're creating a document and you want to store that document, you put that document in a folder. And when you want to get rid of it, you drag it into the trashcan. And these might seem sort of like cute user interface principles, but these were deliberately designed to make something wildly unfamiliar to people who had never worked on a computer to immediately feel more comfortable with it because it works, sounds, and it feels the way the rest of your world works. So even though something is new, doesn't mean that it should be projected as radically.Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm a new innovator or I'm a startup entrepreneur, I've got a new idea I want to start building that out. Do you recommend mapping out these particular frictions or how do you find out what your audience or what your customers are fearful about? David Schonthal: That's a great question. There are a couple of tools we bring to life in the book. One is called a Friction Map, which is anticipating the frictions that might stand in the way of your new ideas. So, it is a document that you can fill out with your team. Where you forecast based on some clear questions that are asked in the Map. What is the relevance? What is the amount of inertia that might be present? What's the amount of effort, friction that might be present? Emotional friction that might be present in reactants? And then there's another framework around remedies. How might you take each of these frictions, test them in the market, but also test possible remedies to overcome. And the more you can bring this into your design process.So, people will fill out a Business Model Canvas based on Osterwalder's work, or they'll fill out a Horizons Framework as they're forecasting what opportunities might exist. We also recommend filling out a Friction Map, which is what are the forces of resistance that might stand in the way. And what might we prototype to overcome those forces as a way of introducing this product or service or strategy.Brian Ardinger: And then do you go out and actually test those assumptions? David Schonthal: Absolutely. Each of them can be prototyped. And yes, testing them with different audiences, testing different ways of communicating or making unfamiliar things familiar. Or identifying the sources of emotional friction so that they can be addressed in the messaging, and the way products are communicated. All are easy enough to test in low fidelity and oftentimes save us a lot of effort down the road when it comes to scaling offers up. Brian Ardinger: One of the other things I liked about the book is that you have not only these frameworks, that people can understand the methodology and that around it, but you also bring out some case studies in the book. And one of them is around Flyhomes, which is a startup company that built a new business model in the real estate space, designed to address some of the frictions in the market. So, can you talk a little bit about that case study? David Schonthal: It's a great story. So Flyhomes, for those of you who are living in the United States while you're watching this can appreciate, we are in the midst of a bananas housing market, residential housing market. Debt has never been cheaper. Inventory has never been lower. And as a result, desirable homes are just flying off the market almost the same day that they're listed, which creates a whole conundrum for people who are trying to buy homes, particularly first-time home buyers. Because when inventory is low, typically the offers that get accepted by sellers, particularly when they have multiple offers, are all cash offers or offers that are perceived to be low risk. And low risk offers are ones that don't have contingencies attached to them. Don't have home sale contingencies. Don't have loan contingencies. In order to compete, in order to get a home buyer, you have to either bring all cash to the table or convince sellers that despite the fact that they've got these contingencies, that there's actually a high degree of certainty, that something will close.Flyhomes is a business that helps address this problem by making all buyers, all cash buyers, they have focused their business model on removing the friction that stands in the way of somebody buying a home in simultaneously removing the friction that stands in the way of a seller accepting the new one offer forum.They didn't start this way. Flyhomes began, in fact, the namesake doesn't come from homes flying off the market. It came from the fact that Stephen Lane and Tushar Garg who were young entrepreneurs, started the business by thinking, all right, in the world of real estate tech, in the world of residential real estate tech, the big names or the new market innovations where things like Trulia and Zillow and Redfin, that had two primary value propositions.One we're either going to take all home inventory off the MLS that exists only for real estate agents, and we're going to democratize it and make it so that anybody who's interested in looking at homes can see all available inventory, which is great. And then the second thing they typically did was discount brokerage. Meaning that if you worked with one of their agents, you would get cash back, they would discount their service fee and you would get some of that back in a rebate. And Steve and Tushar figured there was probably more that could be done in this market. And they being millennials themselves in doing some research, found that millennials, in addition to wanting to own homes, also desired travel, adventure, freedom.And why is it that when we make big purchases on electronics or appliances on a credit card, we get all the benefits that come with a credit card, like points and travel miles. Why don't we get something like that with homes? And so, they created a product called Flyhomes, which is for every dollar you spend on the purchase of a new home, up into a half a million dollars, you would get points on an airline.And they partnered with Alaska and Jet Blue. And Jet Blue actually sent out this mass email to all their frequent flyers saying we're now in this arrangement with Flyhomes, buy a home through Flyhomes get up to 500,000 frequent flyer miles on Jet Blue. In the first day, thousands of people signed up for the platform.And Steve and Tushar looked at themselves like this is going to be huge. And then nothing. Like nothing happened. Nobody was buying a home through Flyhomes. Nobody was actually using the service. There was enough alure or to the idea that got people interested to like check it out and sign up. But that wasn't actually helping people make the progress. They really wanted to make, which wasn't getting 500,000 airline points. It was actually getting the home that they wanted. Flyhomes could address the real problem or address the real progress. All of these bells and whistles wouldn't make things easier. It would just be bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles.So almost at the point of going out of business, they decided to pivot. And because they both had their real estate license started selling real estate. And by studying people in this kind of ethnographic way and actually getting out and selling real estate as realtors, they understood that the problem wasn't the points in adventure.The problem was is that people desired homes in competitive markets that they were unable to access. And after two or three chances of putting in bids and having those bids rejected, people were just giving up on real estate all together. And so Steve and Tushar decided that if they could help address the problem of democratizing the ability for home buyers to buy homes in really competitive markets, that would be a revolutionary change. That would really change the game. And so, they pivoted over from points to friction removal. And today. Flyhomes is growing like crazy. They do billions of dollars a year in transactions. They just raised a really big Series C at $150 million. It's all because they changed their business model from fuel addition to friction removal.Brian Ardinger: Excellent example. Now you've got a number of them in the book and that. What other hidden gems in the book that people should be excited about when they pick it up? David Schonthal: I think the most interesting stories and we try to have as many of them as possible in the book, so the ones that are counterintuitive. Like the ones that really check our biases and our assumptions about what we think the right way to do something is relative to what the science and the data tells us. And one of the things that I think readers who read this book will find is that in many cases, our instincts about what we ought to do to affect change are actually in some ways the opposite of what we ought to do to impact change.And we actually start the book off with a really fun story about the world's most successful car salesperson. A guy named Ali Reda, who works in suburban Detroit, in Dearborn, Michigan. Who outsells every other average car dealer in the United States, by a factor of 12 to one. He single-handedly sells as many as 1500 cars a year, which is more than most dealerships sell in total.And when you study Ali, and when you interview him and when you understand how he approaches car sales, that is so much different than his peers, what you learn is that he just frames his job radically different than every other salesperson. And I won't divulge too much about the secrets of how, but there's lots of examples in this book about how people who go left when everybody else goes right. And to succeed, but it's not just that they go left, it's understanding the psychology of what it is that they're doing differently than enables them to experience that success. Which is really, I think the beautiful thing about partnering with Loren on this is not only do we have examples about how these things work in practice, but we can also help people understand why they work psychologically.Brian Ardinger: So, you've been in this innovation industry for quite a long time. What are some of the biggest changes that you've come across and how do you see the innovation space kind of evolving? David Schonthal: That is a, the ability for people to create new ideas and make them real has never been easier. The cost of starting a new business, the cost of creating a new product or service with digital technology has enabled everybody who once had an idea on a napkin sketch.You now have the ability to make that sketch into something real and tangible and available in the market. And what I find now is, we've got a different problem, which is that the world is flooded with new ideas and flooded with new technologies. And whereas before it used to be hard to make an idea into a real thing. Now it's getting people to notice and pay attention and actually adopt your real thing. And one of the ways that we think about doing it is spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising and SEO and SEM. And yes, that's part of building awareness. But we don't often think about awareness as being one side of the equation. The other side is how do you make it easy for people to say yes. Well, one of the things we noticed about new products and services, particularly when you're creating a new consumer product is people will learn about it. They'll even go to the website, they'll put it in their cart, but at the moment before they check out, they'll abandon their cart, which means you've done half the job, right.You've gotten them interested to come to the site at the beginning. You've gotten them interested enough in the features and benefits to actually add that, or imagine that in their lives, but something is holding them back from actually pulling the trigger. And I think, now we've created a world where making the idea come to life has never been easier. But how do we make sure that it's easy for people to adopt that into their lives so that they can say yes, and to get noticed in that way. It's no longer about features and benefits. Now it's just about making things as frictionless and as effortless as possible for people to adopt. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: And the great thing about that is that's becoming easier as well. And people like yourself are helping in that process. So, David, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit about some of the secret sauce behind all that. I encourage people to pick up The Human Element. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? David Schonthal: HumanElementBook.com is a landing page that shares information about the book. You can find me on the Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management faculty page, just Google my name, David Schonthal. And usually, you can find me there and I'd love to hear from you. Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you David, for being on the show and look forward to continuing the conversation as the years and the innovation evolve. David Schonthal: Thanks Brian. Me too. It was great to be here. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

El Secretario adjunto de la departamental AJB Lomas nos habló sobre la convocatoria del gobierno provincial para discutir las negociaciones paritarias con los trabajadores judiciales.

– Når det går bra, er det vanskelig å tenke på fremtiden. Men tenk på hvor mange selskaper som har vært på toppen, for så å forsvinne. Ting kan forandre seg veldig fort, sier Alexander Osterwalder. Den sveitsiske forfatteren, foredragsholderen, konsulenten og innovasjonseksperten skal holde et av hovedinnleggene under Oslo Business Forum den 29. september. I episode 35 av podkasten All In med Oslo Business Forum, kommer han i samtalen med Tor Haugnes innom hvordan selskaper forblir konkurransedyktige i usikre tider, hva forskjellen er mellom strategi og innovasjon og hva som er oppskriften for å bli uovervinnelig. I denne podkastepisoden kan du høre mer om: – Hva kjennetegner en god innovatør? – Hvorfor definerer Osterwalder noen businessmodeller som døende? – Hvordan kan ledere unngå å investere masse penger i innovasjon, uten å få noe som helst igjen for det? Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Diane Dickel from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to talk about her work on ultraconserved enhancers and enhancer redundancy. Diane Dickel and her co-workers study non-coding regions of the genome that harbor distant-acting transcriptional regulatory regions, called enhancers. Enhancers have been shown to be critical for normal embryonic development, implying evolutional conservation. Diane Dickel and her team try to identify and characterize enhancers at a genomic scale. Their efforts include the use of CRISPR/CAS9 to mutate enhancer sequences in order to understand sequence dependent functional relevance. In this episode we discuss the function of ultraconserved enhancers, what ultraconservation actually means, how enhancer redundancy works and how Diane Dickel dealt with a failed PhD project.   References Dickel, D. E., Ypsilanti, A. R., Pla, R., Zhu, Y., Barozzi, I., Mannion, B. J., Khin, Y. S., Fukuda-Yuzawa, Y., Plajzer-Frick, I., Pickle, C. S., Lee, E. A., Harrington, A. N., Pham, Q. T., Garvin, T. H., Kato, M., Osterwalder, M., Akiyama, J. A., Afzal, V., Rubenstein, J. L. R., … Visel, A. (2018). Ultraconserved Enhancers Are Required for Normal Development. Cell, 172(3), 491-499.e15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.12.017 Gorkin, D. U., Barozzi, I., Zhao, Y., Zhang, Y., Huang, H., Lee, A. Y., Li, B., Chiou, J., Wildberg, A., Ding, B., Zhang, B., Wang, M., Strattan, J. S., Davidson, J. M., Qiu, Y., Afzal, V., Akiyama, J. A., Plajzer-Frick, I., Novak, C. S., … Ren, B. (2020). An atlas of dynamic chromatin landscapes in mouse fetal development. Nature, 583(7818), 744–751. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2093-3 Snetkova, V., Ypsilanti, A. R., Akiyama, J. A., Mannion, B. J., Plajzer-Frick, I., Novak, C. S., Harrington, A. N., Pham, Q. T., Kato, M., Zhu, Y., Godoy, J., Meky, E., Hunter, R. D., Shi, M., Kvon, E. Z., Afzal, V., Tran, S., Rubenstein, J. L. R., Visel, A., … Dickel, D. E. (2021). Ultraconserved enhancer function does not require perfect sequence conservation. Nature Genetics, 53(4), 521–528. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-021-00812-3   Related Episodes Identification of Functional Elements in the Genome (Bing Ren) Epigenetic Reprogramming During Mammalian Development (Wolf Reik) Unraveling Mechanisms of Chromosome Formation (Job Dekker)   Contact Active Motif on Twitter Epigenetics Podcast on Twitter Active Motif on LinkedIn Active Motif on Facebook Email: podcast@activemotif.com

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.

El Secretario adjunto de la departamental AJB LOMAS nos habló del reclamo que hace el gremio para que se limite la presencialidad en el poder judicial por el incremento de casos de coronavirus.

Episode Summary: In this episode Dr Sharon Tal and I discuss how the book she co-authored with Prof Marc Gruber, ‘Where to Play' complements the Lean Start Up movement and Design Thinking. She also explains how the Market Opportunity Navigator could benefit large organisations as well as start-ups.   Bio: Dr. Tal helps entrepreneurs and managers identify, evaluate and prioritize market opportunities for their business. Together with Prof Marc Gruber she wrote the book ‘Where to Play' to help companies choose a promising strategic focus and move forward with confidence. Dr. Tal is the co-founder and former Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. She runs courses and workshops in accelerators and universities around the world, and serves as a mentor in many organizations that aim to help budding entrepreneurs. Sharon has vast experience in marketing, as she served as a marketing manager for firms in several industries, as well as extensive experience in strategic consulting. Her PhD research looked at market entry decisions of hundreds of startups and its consequences on firm performance and flexibility. Website/ social media: Where to Play website: https://wheretoplay.co/ Sharon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-tal-itzkovitch-a390414a/ Where to Play LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wheretoplay/ Twitter: @WhereToPlayCo   Books mentioned in this episode: [NOTE: We currently bear all costs for organising, producing and hosting the podcast series. To help us offset costs, would you consider purchasing the mentioned books via our Amazon affiliate links below? Doing this could give us a commission from Amazon at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] Where to Play: 3 Steps to Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities by Marc Gruber and Sharon Tal End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business by Rita Gunther McGrath Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen by Rita Gunther McGrath The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems by Tendai Viki, Dan Toma & Esther Gons Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank 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 Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller   Articles: Steve Blank's Blog on Where to Play https://steveblank.com/2019/05/07/how-to-stop-playing-target-market-roulette-a-new-addition-to-the-lean-toolset/ Steve Blank's 2nd blog on Where to Play: https://steveblank.com/2020/06/23/winners-rising-out-of-the-crisis-where-to-find-new-markets-and-customers/   Interview Transcript: Ula Ojiaku:  01:16 So, we have with us today, Sharon Ta1, who is the co-author of the book Where to Play. Sharon, thank you so much for making the time to be our guest on this podcast. Sharon Tal:  01:28 My pleasure - hi, Ula! Ula Ojiaku:  01:30 Hi! So, let's start! I did a bit of research, you know, just to find out a bit more about you before this conversation and I Googled (the name) Sharon Tal - it seems like it's a very popular name for famous people. So, I saw an actress who is famous and a notable TV producer who used to be with Amazon… What do you think about that? Sharon Tal:  01:53 Actually, that's a unique question Ula - original one. So it's true - Sharon is a very popular Israeli name. I come from Israel, and it's a very popular Israel name, especially for women around my age. The meaning of Sharon is actually a geographical area in Israel. And I've never been the only Sharon in class, university, work, wherever. And of course, there are many others with even the same surname. So, I'm used to some of these confusions by now. Ula Ojiaku:  02:26 Okay, I love the name. And I remember seeing the reference to it for the first time in the Bible, you know - the Rose of Sharon. It has a significant meaning to me as well. Sharon Tal: 02:36 Thank you. Ula Ojiaku:  02:38 You are a very accomplished person, having written the book, the significant work you did with your PhD that culminated in the co-authoring of the book, Where to Play with Professor Marc Gruber. And yet in my limited interaction with you, you come across as a very personable, down to earth person, very easy to communicate with.  Can you tell us a bit about your journey so far? How did you get to where you are currently? Sharon Tal:  03:05 Well, first of all, thank you for the warm words. And always nice to hear that other think you are well-accomplished. I started my journey as a Marketing Manager. But at some point, I wanted to go back to study masters thesis in Strategic Management. And I went back to where I did my first degree, which is the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and I kind of fell in love with the academic field and a great place to stay, especially when you have kids at home. So, after I finished my masters thesis,  I stayed in the university and I co-founded the Entrepreneurship Center there. So, then I was managing the Entrepreneurship Center at the Technion and that's where I got to learn so much about the entrepreneurial journey and meet and consult with hundreds of early-stage startups and entrepreneurs - especially technology entrepreneurs. And during that time, I noticed that there is a challenge that is very common to many of them and that was figuring out which market to pursue with their innovative idea. And given that I was coming from a marketing background, I wanted to help them find a structure for this decision, and we couldn't find a good tool. So eventually, I decided to do my PhD on this topic. And we looked at hundreds of early stage startups and how they managed this trade off, this question of where to focus, and how to focus properly. I'm telling you all this because it's just a step-by-step process in my career that at the end led me to have this deep know-how and expertise in figuring out how to focus properly for and find the best market. So, given all this academic and practical understanding, at the end, we decided to write this book and develop this methodology, the market opportunity navigator to bring this know-how, which is (the) theoretical and practical, together to the practitioners. At the end, that's my career story and today, I work mainly when training this methodology, either in academic institutes or early stage entrepreneurs' programs, for budding entrepreneurs, and also larger organizations and innovation managers. Ula Ojiaku:  05:25 Okay, so that means you are open to like consulting with either budding entrepreneurs or large or small organizations. Sharon Tal:  05:34 Correct. Only thing I want to refine here is it's not exactly consulting. As far as I said, it's more of a facilitation, so I facilitate the process with them. The difference is, as a consultant -  and I used to work as a consultant in the past - you don't only ask the questions, you also bring the answers. When you facilitate a process, you help the team ask the right questions, but they bring the answers to the table, and then you'll help them digest and make the right decisions out of that. So, that's what I mainly do today I think, facilitation rather than consulting. Ula Ojiaku:  06:13 I like the way you've differentiated the term, ‘consultants' and you've emphasized that you're more of a facilitator. That gives me the impression that it's more about you drawing out the information or the answers that they already know that's within them - because they know their context better than you ever could - having been there. But you are helping them to draw out the answers and helping them to use the tool adequately in their context. Sharon Tal:  06:41 Correct. Ula Ojiaku:  06:42 Ok, thanks for the clarification Sharon. What would you consider as the main challenge you've experienced in your career or personally? Sharon Tal:  06:51 Yeah. Okay. So, let me divide this into two. So professionally and personally. From a professional perspective, I think the most challenging part was to bridge the gap between academia and the practical world. In a way, I was blessed to have prior experience in both. And when we started to write the book, we also thought it's going to be quite easy to find a way to bridge this gap. But it took us much longer than we expected, because it's very challenging to find the middle ground between being thorough enough and simple enough. And that's the challenge of combining theories, and bringing them to - in a very simple, appealing way - to practitioners. So, from a professional perspective, I think that's the main challenge. From personal perspective. But that's not only me, I'm sure that many women in general, I think the main challenge always has been to balance life and career, especially having three kids at home and finding the way to be both a good professional and a good mother and wife. So that's always the thing for me. And almost every decision that I've made in my career was somehow made having this challenge in mind. Ula Ojiaku:  08:15 I totally empathize. I mean, you're a little bit ahead of me, because I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old and… Sharon Tal: 08:23 They will grow. Ula Ojiaku:  08:25 They will and they are, I mean, things are much better than when they were in diapers, certainly. But I've found myself having to make decisions professionally, that take into consideration how it's going to affect them, especially at their age. Yes, so I've made sacrifices and compromises and I'll do it all over again. Sharon Tal:  08:48 So, would I. So, would I, so I am proud of my sacrifices. I think they were right. So, I would do it all over again. Ula Ojiaku:  08:56 They're not always young, like you said, and that gives me hope - they'll grow up and give us freer times. Now moving on to… so moving on to your book, Where to Play. I've already had a very good chat with your co-author, Professor Marc Gruber. And he gave us an overview of the work you'd done and what the market opportunity navigator is all about. For the audience members who are yet to listen to this and just as a recap, can you give us a recap of what this is (about) please? Sharon Tal:  09:26 Sure, so the book Where to Play presents a structured methodology or framework if you want that is called the market opportunity navigator. This process helps entrepreneurs and business managers to find or discover the best market opportunities for their innovation. Think about any almost any technological innovation or idea that you have or even existing business line of company, they can always apply it to create different offerings or address the needs of different types of customers. So, the process helps you with three steps. First, it's about identifying; discovering different market opportunities for this innovation. What type of applications, I can stem from your core abilities, and who may need it - in any combination of application and customer is a market opportunity for your company? The second step is the evaluation step. So, you need to be able to comprehensively assess the attractiveness of these different directions, or different opportunities, either if you're an early stage startup, or if you're looking for the growth engines for your venture for your company. So, the second step helps you to systematically evaluate the potential and the challenge of every market opportunity on your plate and compare them visually. And the third step is about prioritizing. How do you compile all this information that I'm learning to set a smart to design a smart strategy for your company, a strategy that can utilize this multiple market opportunities in your favour? So, if you are an early stage startup, you can utilize these multiple opportunities to set your backup and growth options and keep them open for the future. If you're a large organization, you can utilize these multiple opportunities, to design a portfolio of growth options - those that are a little bit more related and more far out from your existing business line - to create this balanced portfolio of growth or growing options. Just to summarize this three-step process, and very structured because every step has a dedicated worksheet to help you go through this decision making. So, it's very easy, in a way very easy to apply either as a sole manager, but also in a team. Probably one of the main benefits is that it creates a shared language or communication tool. You can now walk through this strategic design or strategic process in a very systematic way, involving different people, or employees or stakeholders. Ula Ojiaku:  12:09 Thanks a lot. That's a very good overview. Just tying to that, because you said it could be used by you know, both individuals and small and large enterprises. So, for large organizations, how could the market opportunity navigator benefit large organizations? Sharon Tal:  12:37 Yeah, it's interesting, because, you know, when we started developing this tool, we had startups in mind, and it was actually based on our deep, you know, research for how early stage startups make decisions. But very quickly, we figured out that large organizations also need a structured process to identify their next growth opportunities. And some of them, of course, already apply some processes, but they are not always  comprehensive and some of them are just doing this messy decision-making process with no systematic practices. And that creates a little bit too much emphasis on luck rather than systems. Ula Ojiaku:  13:09 And sometimes, it's really about the most senior person who is just, you know, pushing it (their agenda) or the loudest, right? Sharon Tal:  13:16 Correct. Definitely, right. Definitely, right. So, so I think the very first thing to keep in mind is if you have a structured tool that can involve different types of employees and managers and manager levels. In this process, it's very valuable. Now, the thing that we've found most beneficial for larger corporates when they use the market opportunity navigator is actually the identification phase. So, let me explain why. Many times, managers are bounded within their existing industry lines. And today, we know from different books and different studies, including a very good one by Rita McGrath that industry lines are quickly blurring, and competitive advantage is very temporary. And therefore, organizations need to find and identify opportunities, not necessarily within their existing industries. So, they actually need to learn how to break out from existing industries and think wider. And that's a challenging process. So, the first step of the Market Opportunity Navigator helps you to first characterize your core strengths or core abilities in their own right. And then think how you can combine or recombine them in different ways to create completely different offerings, for completely different market segments or market opportunities. That really helps you to think outside your limited industrial boundaries. And what we see happening many times is, these structured brainstorming sessions are very powerful. You can use them to analyze your core strength and think what else you can do with it. It's like an exercise in cognitive flexibility. But you can also use this to ask yourself, okay, now that I've listed this core strength, what if I had a new one? What if I developed another core element in here? For example, blockchain abilities, whatever, okay, and how would that open up different opportunities for my company? So, it's a semi-structured discovery process, which is very powerful to help companies discover their opportunity arena. So, an arena is a concept again coined by Rita McGrath that said, don't forget your industries, think about your larger opportunity spaces or arenas, and that discovery process is very valuable in this manner for this specific issue. Now, also, I think, larger organizations are looking for ways to bring in entrepreneurial mindsets and entrepreneurial imagination. So, using these tools which were originally tailored for startups and bring(ing) them into their meeting rooms is actually very nice. You can put this thing (the Market Opportunity Navigator template) on a wall, you can use sticky notes, you can run these brainstorming sessions. It's fun, it's enjoyable, it's engaging. And I think large corporates could definitely find the benefit in this approach as well. Now, another thing to keep in mind probably is that once you discover opportunities with this first step of the Navigator, the second one helps you to quickly distinguish or characterize them based on the potential that they bear for your company and the challenge in pursuing them. So, you can very quickly or you can characterize or distinguish between these ideas, and find your goldmine opportunities - those that are higher on potential and relatively low or manageable on challenge. You can also use this to find your quick wins, which are maybe modest on potential but relatively safe. And actually, quick wins have a good benefit in larger organizations because they help make the change. If you start your process with applying some or pursuing some quick wins, you get the buy in of stakeholders' entire management more easily. And you're on your way to a larger change in the future - for your moonshot's opportunities, for example, in the future. So, I think that's maybe another benefit to keep in mind. Ula Ojiaku:  17:48 So, Sharon, can you define what you mean by a moonshot? I mean, goldmine sounds like it's something that would be potentially highly profitable, with medium to minimal effort on the part of the organization. And there is the quick win, you know, the low hanging fruit, which is easy-to-get medium-sized opportunities, but it's easier to implement and get but what would be a moonshot? Sharon Tal:  18:12 So, you're definitely right with your interpretation. The moonshot opportunities are those with a high potential, but also extremely high challenge. Now many breakthrough innovations or if you think about large corporates, breaking beyond their existing business lines, beyond their existing customer segments is challenging, but you want to have those in your portfolio as well. Right? So, that's when we talk about the attractiveness of different opportunities. We categorize them based on these two dimensions: potential and challenge. And moonshot is one of these quadrants, you know, matrix. Ula Ojiaku:  18:47 Okay, you mentioned Rita McGrath's book, were you referring to The Competitive Advantage? Or is there any other book…? Sharon Tal:  18:54 Yeah, so she has actually two books that relates to this topic. One is The End of Competitive Advantage, exactly the one you mentioned, where she talks about the fact that competitive advantage is very temporary these days, and companies must be able to explore new opportunities all the time, and move quickly, or reconfigure their assets quickly to move from one opportunity to the other. And the Market Opportunity Navigator helps you to do just that. How do you leverage your existing abilities and core strengths to completely new opportunities? The other book that was recently published is Seeing Around Corners, where she provides some more guidelines on how to identify when disruption is coming into your industry, and then you need to quickly figure out what to do with that. Ula Ojiaku:  19:52 Okay, okay. That's great. You've beautifully explained why the Market Opportunity Navigator would be beneficial to large organizations as well, even though it was originally put together, synthesized for startups, for entrepreneurs. How does the Market Opportunity Navigator complement the Lean Startup cycle? Sharon Tal:  20:14 Yeah, yes, that's actually a great question. Because when we designed it, we didn't want to (re-)invent, you know, the wheel. We wanted to join the Lean Startup movement. But we felt that the tools of the Lean Startup customer development process, the Business Model Canvas, the Agile development - all of these tools are very good to quickly find your product-market fit within a market domain, or pivot quickly if you find out it's the wrong one. But what they don't tell you is where to actually start digging in, where to actually start your customer development process. And that's where the Market Opportunity Navigator comes in, and there was recently a blog published by Steve Blank, the father of Lean Startup, where he actually talks about the key addition of the Market Opportunity Navigator into the Lean Toolset. The idea is that the Market Opportunity Navigator helps you to figure out where to play, find out this market domains where you can dig in or you can have some businesses. And then the Lean Toolset helps you to zoom in and figure out how to play. And you can very quickly experiment and refine and figure out your business model within the market domain. So, it's the wide lens perspective to help you define the boundaries for your lean experimentation. Now, one thing to keep in mind that at the end of the day, this is a very iterative process, right? You zoom in and zoom out, you can do this wide lens analysis, figure out the domain, zoom in with the lean experimentation, use these great Lean Startup tools, learn and go up and reflect again, on what you've learned with this wider reflection tool, which is the market opportunity navigator. So, definitely complements these great tools in the title, interestingly, the title that Steve Blank gave to this post is ‘Stop Playing Target Market Roulette', so use this systematic process to define the boundaries of your lean experimentation. Ula Ojiaku:  22:26 Steve Blank actually mentioned your book as well, when I interviewed him, he had high praises for it in terms of how it helped with structuring…at least giving startups a targeted view of where to focus on. I also get the sense that the Navigator ties in quite well with Design Thinking, because it's not about being haphazard. It's really about adding some rigor and structure to how you determine where you play. So, can you tell me a bit more about how the Navigator complements Design Thinking? Sharon Tal:  23:01 Sure. So, first Design Thinking has very, some very, you know, common elements with the Lean Startup, especially when we talk about prototyping and experimenting, validating an idea early on in the market. The key issue for me in Design Thinking is the first steps of customer empathy. So, identifying new opportunities, by putting yourself in the shoes of different customer segments. Now, I think this is actually a great methodology to discover new opportunities for your company. And the reason it complements the market opportunity navigator is because the navigators actually don't start with empathy with customer, it starts with what are your core strengths or abilities, and how can you leverage them to create different or to address the needs of different types of customers. So, at the end of the day, to have a good opportunity, it has to have these two ends, it has to have a clear need from the market. But also, you should be able to address these needs with your core strengths and abilities. So, the discovery process can begin with putting yourselves in the shoes of different types of customer like Design Thinking. But it could also begin with figuring out what's your core abilities or technological elements, and how you can reconfigure them differently. At the end, you will need to tie both ends anyway together to have an opportunity. My main way of looking at this is that they are different perspectives for identifying new market opportunities for the company and both are excellent. And then you create this multiple set of opportunities and you move forward to evaluating and prioritizing them. Ula Ojiaku:  24:52 It gives me the impression that you could start using the Design Thinking and putting yourself in the customers shoes, but you could start from evaluating your strengths, and also understanding what the customer needs. And then finding that, you know, that happy place where what you have, can adequately meet customer's needs or demands. Sharon Tal:  25:12 Exactly. And now, this is a process that it's a discovery process, and it takes time to find and the great thing is, by having multiple opportunities or a large set of opportunities is a real asset for your company. Because at the end, it will help you to find those most promising fertile grounds. So, you can definitely use both methodologies to bring in as many ideas as possible and then start validating them, be able to make sure that you have some good options on your table. Ula Ojiaku:  25:48 So how would you balance this though, because you could go on analyzing, how do you prevent yourself from going into analysis paralysis versus acting and knowing when you've done enough? Sharon Tal:  25:56 Yeah, good, good question. Okay, so I think the first thing I would say I would recommend is, again, is to have a structured process - adopt a structured process. Understand, how do you plan to actually bring the data or the evidence in to make a choice, but you also need to understand that even if you have a systematic process, it doesn't give you a crystal ball to know the future. So, you also need to learn to live with uncertainty because the business world is unpredictable. Innovation is unpredictable. So, my suggestion would be, use a systematic evaluation process, clearly define your criteria and in line with the Lean Startup, start with your assumptions and prepare a clear action plan how you're going to bring evidence to support these assumptions. And at some point, just compile all the data that you have, and make a decision. And one thing that we have learned is that, it's often difficult to compiled all the data that you have to have to create a clear pattern out of this. So, you send your employees, you send your teams to gather information, to talk with potential customers, to do market research on the competitors on different landscapes of opportunities. But how do you then compile all these bits and bytes of information into one clear image or pattern? That's I think, one of the challenges where the market opportunity navigator comes in handy, because it helps you to first be very systematic about the consideration, the criteria, and also consolidate these different factors into one simple image that we call the Attractiveness Map. Ula Ojiaku:  27:53 It kind of brings to mind Alex Osterwalder book on Value Proposition Design and Testing Business Ideas So, there are concepts that I believe that could also help with a structured approach to processing the data collected to help with decision making. What's your view on that? Sharon Tal:  28:11 Oh, yeah, you're definitely right. Again, I think different tools help you to do different jobs. And the tools like the tools by Osterwalder and Pigneur, and his new book on how to test your ideas. They're all really great resources to help you validate these opportunities, make sure you have a scalable, repeatable business in there. And that's why I said it's a ‘zoom in and zoom out' type of process. And in the book, we actually also describe how these tools go together in a very complementing manner, especially because they not only help you to zoom in, but also to validate your initial potential and challenges. Ula Ojiaku:  28:58 So, let's move to the next part of this conversation. So, what books would you recommend to someone who wants to learn more about the topics we've discussed? Where to Play is the key one, but what other books would you recommend? Sharon Tal:  29:13 Yeah, okay. So, first of all, it's the trivial ones, those that are, you know, the, on the top of the list of the lean processes like the initial book by Steve Blank, and the books by Osterwalder and Pigneur, which described the Business Model/ Value Proposition Canvases, and of course, Eric Ries lean startup, these are the basic ones for the lean processes. I think it's challenging a bit to bring this startup methodologies into larger corporate settings. So, one book that I find that does it quite nicely is The Corporate Startup, by Tendai Viki and Dan Thomas. And they, they translate this process that comes from small organizations into processes, which are adequate for larger corporates and I think that's quite an interesting read. On a different perspective, I recently read a book called Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller, which talks about how to clearly phrase and define your messages within a specific market. So, I think, once you have done this search, validated it and decide to focus on pursuing a specific market opportunity, this is a very valuable next step read, because it really gives you a good perspective on how to simply explain your message and convey your message. Ula Ojiaku:  30:55 Well, thanks, Sharon. If any member of the audience wants to contact you, how can they reach you? Are you on social media? Do you have a website? Sharon Tal:  31:02 Yeah, sure. So, the natural first pass is our website. It's www.wheretoplay.co and then we have all the information about the Market Opportunity Navigator. You can download the worksheets and the Navigator for free. You can read all these posts and articles and examples and case studies and also about the book. So, there's a lot of information and resources out there. Actually, we also have free slide sets and materials for mentors, for consultants, for managers that want to run brainstorming sessions around this. So, there's a lot of materials out there and it's almost all for free except for the book of course. And then you can find me on LinkedIn, both my personal account, and its under Sharon Tal Itzkovitch and Where to Play, we also have a where to play account on LinkedIn. And I'm also active on Twitter under Where to Play, so you can find me on wheretoplay on Twitter. Ula Ojiaku:  32:05 Okay, I'll add all these links to the show notes. So, thanks a lot, Sharon. So, any final advice to the audience? Based on what we've discussed so far for someone or an organization starting off in their lean innovation journey? What would be your advice? Sharon Tal:  32:28 Oh, wow! Maybe the one key thing to keep in mind is that it's a continuous work. It's a continuous process, innovation and exploration never ends actually, for and doesn't matter if you're a startup or a large corporate. And given that it's a continuous effort. You need to make it a habit, and you need to make it iterative. And I think the more you're able to put systems and structured processes inside this, the easier it gets to make it iterative and to make it a habit. That's my advice. Ula Ojiaku:  33:08 That's a great advice. So, innovation and exploration never end. Make it a habit. Make it iterative. Yes. That's great. Fantastic. Thank you so much once more, Dr. Sharon for taking the time for this chat. It's been a great pleasure having you. Sharon Tal:  33:24 Thank you very much Ula for hosting me and it was my pleasure as well.

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.

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.  

Entrevistamos a Jorge Sebastian Osterwalder Secretario adjunto de la departamental Ajb Lomas (Asociación judicial bonaerense), sobre el comunicado que sacaron en apoyo a la Jueza Brenda Madrid, tras los ataques y acusaciones del Diario La Nación por la determinación del sobreseimiento de Pablo Moyano.

Innovationen etablieren mit Alex Osterwalder Innovationen finden oft in Workshops statt. Isoliert zum Tagesgeschäft. Wie es gelingen kann Innovation im Unternehmen ankommen zu lassen, erklärt Alex Osterwalder

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured: Alex Osterwalder Mark Suster Melody Koh Farooq Abbasi Each investor discusses sectors, drivers, and/or trends that may have a significant impact in the future and are potentially positioned for outsized-returns.

www.newworkhero.es/podcast Wie kann es gelingen, die Idee zu entwickeln, die den Durchbruch schafft? Woran merkt man, welches Projekt das Potenzial hat zu wachsen und möglichst viele Kunden zu erreichen? Und einmal geschafft, wie hält man als Unternehmen diesen Erfolg und innoviert ständig weiter? Mit The Invincible Company haben Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur und Co eine hochspannende Blaupause veröffentlicht, die Entrepreneurship auf eine neue Ebene hebt. In dieser Erfolge erzähle ich warum.

In this episode of #TheSpeakerShow, Sean Pillot de Chenecey interviews Alex Osterwalder - one of the world's most influential strategy and 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. 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. Strategyzer, the company he co-founded, is an innovation powerhouse, providing online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation.   In this dynamic episode, we discuss a range of his viewpoints on issues including:  Business Model Generation  Value Proposition Design  Testing Business Ideas Invincible Companies Inventing the Future

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/

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured: -Beezer Clarkson -Alex Osterwalder -Patrick Gallagher -Steve Blank Each investor discusses a portfolio company that did not survive and why it was that they failed.

Tercer capítulo de nuestros encuentros de ventas (basados en mis seminarios homónimos) 3 de 7 que serán. Hemos hablado hasta ahora de: Ep 109: Quién queremos ser comercialmente Ep. 110: Segmentación Hoy hablamos de como acompañar al cliente en los sucesivos puntos de contacto que tenemos con el Les dejo un link al libro de Osterwalder (de nuevo) https://www.strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation y uno a la matriz de partners de Kosnik que ya vimos antes: http://media.gogearshare.com/2014/06/Stanford_SQ14.Partners.v1.pdf

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​, to publish in spring 2020. (Interviewed by StartupGrind's Chris Joannou).

References1. Research on whether entrepreneurs learn from their failures: Ucbasaran, D., Westhead, P., & Wright, M. (2011). Why Serial Entrepreneurs Don't Learn from Failure. Harvard Business Review, 89(4), 26. 2. Reference to the book "Testing business ideas": Bland, D., & Osterwalder, A. (2020). Testing business ideas. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.3. The quote "Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change" in the introduction to the podcast is attributable Dr Wayne Dyer, an internationally renowned author and speaker in the fields of self-development and spiritual growth. Source of quote: Dyer, W. (2009), Success Secrets, Retrieved from https://www.drwaynedyer.com/blog/success-secrets/

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured: Alex Osterwalder Beezer Clarkson Michael Cardamone Leo Polovets Each investor illustrates a critical lesson learned about startup investing and how it's changed their approach. To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.

Alex Osterwalder is primarily known for developing the Business Model Canvas, a template that helps startups develop and document new or existing business models. In this interview, Osterwalder shares his best insights into the world of business models—ideas that are especially applicable now as entrepreneurs try to launch businesses during Covid-19. He explains why products, technology, and price alone aren’t enough to keep your company competitive. Osterwalder also breaks down the innovative models that Apple, Netflix, and Nintendo have used to become industry leaders (and why even these behemoths aren’t safe from disruption). We also get a sneak peek into Osterwalder’s latest book called “The Invincible Company.” Not only does it contain an entire library of business models for companies of all sizes, but it also provides guidance on how startups can continuously reinvent themselves to stay ahead of the curve. If there’s any other content you’d like to see that would be valuable to you during this time, please don’t hesitate to reach out at support@foundr.com. Key Takeaways How Osterwalder came to study business models in graduate school Insight into Osterwalder’s latest book, “The Invincible Company” Why companies can’t compete on products, technology, and price alone (and why your business model can provide the ultimate competitive edge) The scalability of business models Why companies need to transcend industry boundaries The reason why Osterwalder urges entrepreneurs to test before they build How Apple, Netflix, and Nintendo are prime case studies of innovative business models in action—but why even they’re not safe from disruption Osterwalder’s stance on the “magic bullet” when it comes to business models (hint: there isn’t one)  

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured: Alex Osterwalder Scott Kupor Cheryl Cheng Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to invest, why they passed, and how it played out. To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.

This episode is brought to you by Collective Campus brand new online innovation courses. Whether you want to learn about business models and testing ideas with Alex Osterwalder, building a corporate startup with Dan Toma, or learn about topics such as design thinking, and agile fundamentals, head to www.collectivecampus.io/online I’ll also be running a 2-hour webinar on remote work and productivity in early July, based on the popularity of my five levels of remote work article, which you can learn more about at bit.ly/fivelevelswebinar And to today’s episode. Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential strategy and 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. 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. He returned to the podcast to talk about what leaders can do to build truly invincible companies and weather storms that are a result of technological and social change, financial market shocks and of course, viruses. We explored: 1 - what defines an invincible company 2 - how companies can balance a portfolio between exploration of new business models and exploitation of existing ones 3 - what companies like Amazon, IKEA and Logitech have done to play the long game and stay relevant 4 - and finally, how one such invincible company profiled in the book, Airbnb, might weather the storm of COVID-19 With that, I bring you the one and only, Alex Osterwalder. Topics Discussed: Lockdown in Switzerland Alex’s new book What is an invincible company The wakeup call we needed? Cashflow runway and business model reinvention Case studies and success stories Tools for managing innovation Leading indicators v trailing indicators Hilti Bosch Culture lags systems The optimism bias and the narrative fallacy Transcending boundaries Explore v exploit portfolios When to kill a project Why entrepreneurs are more risk averse than the general public Why market validation isn’t a conclusive test, but an indicative one The ‘science vs art’ of innovation and entrepreneurship How to use patterns to shift from outdated business models Questions to ask when assessing business opportunities How to play the long game amidst ROI uncertainty Metered funding Innovation Project Scorecard Placing many bets, and how Testing business ideas The culture map Values alignement and intrinsic motivation Delegations of authority Airbnb in crisis mode and why they’ll come out of it Show Notes: Online courses: www.collectivecampus.io/online Remote work webinar: http://bit.ly/fivelevelswebinar Strategyzer: Strategyzer.com The Invincible Company: https://amzn.to/2Lg2tEM Testing Business Ideas: https://amzn.to/2YLSpLo Twitter: @alexosterwalder --- Listen to Future Squared on Apple Podcasts  goo.gl/sMnEa0 Also available on: Spotify, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher and Soundcloud Twitter: www.twitter.com/steveglaveski Instagram: www.instagram.com/@thesteveglaveski Future Squared: www.futuresquared.xyz Steve Glaveski: www.steveglaveski.com Medium: www.medium.com/@steveglaveski Steve's book: www.employeetoentrepreneur.io NEW Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/futuresquared/ Watch on YouTube: https://bit.ly/2N77FLx

Alex Osterwalder is an author, entrepreneur, and leading thinker on business strategy and innovation. He is the co-founder of Strategyzer and creator of the Business Model Canvas, a tool for designing and mapping business models. Osterwalder is coauthor of a new book, The Invincible Company, which decodes how some of the world's leading companies have built superior business models and reinvented themselves, and the lessons that other organizations can learn. In this discussion with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, Osterwalder discusses insights from the book, including innovation strategy, organization, and how to balance exploration and exploitation. *** The BCG Henderson Institute is the Boston Consulting Group's think tank, dedicated to exploring and developing valuable new insights from business, technology, economics, and science by embracing the powerful technology of ideas. The Institute engages leaders in provocative discussion and experimentation to expand the boundaries of business theory and practice and to translate innovative ideas from within and beyond business. For more ideas and inspiration, sign up to receive BHI INSIGHTS, our monthly newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

My guest today is Alexander Osterwalder, one of the world's most influential strategy and 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. 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. The topic is his book The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models (The Strategyzer Series). In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Diversified Portfolio Quarterly Return Predictability in your Execution Business Experimentation and Adaptation Strategic Exploration Capability Business Models Leadership System Exploration and Execution The Invincible Company Innovation Building Fundamentals Creating Value Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneurs’ Business Model Canvas changed the way the world creates and plans new business models. It has been used by corporations and startups and consultants around the world and is taught in hundreds of universities. After years of researching how the world’s best companies develop, test, and scale new business models, the authors have produced their definitive work. The Invincible Company explains what every organization can learn from the business models of the world’s most exciting companies. The Invincible Company explains how companies such as Amazon, IKEA, Airbnb, Microsoft, and Logitech, have been able to create immensely successful businesses and disrupt entire industries. At the core of these successes are not just great products and services, but profitable, innovative business models–and the ability to improve existing business models while consistently launching new ones. The Invincible Company presents practical new tools for measuring, managing, and accelerating innovation, and strategies for reducing risk when launching new business models. Serving as a blueprint for your growth strategy, The Invincible Company explains how to constantly stay ahead of your competition. In-depth chapters explain how to create new growth engines, change how products and services are created and delivered, extract maximum profit from each type of business model, and much more. New tools―such as the Business Model Portfolio Map, Innovation Metrics, Innovation Strategy Framework, and the Culture Map―enable readers to understand how to design invincible companies. Bio: Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world’s most influential strategy and 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. 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. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Diversified Portfolio Quarterly Return Predictability in your Execution Business Experimentation and Adaptation Strategic Exploration Capability Business Models Leadership System Exploration and Execution The Invincible Company Innovation Building Fundamentals Creating Value

Business theorist, author, and speaker Alex Osterwalder discusses his two newest books, Testing Business Ideas and the upcoming The Invincible Company. Both books are part of a series focused on helping leaders undertake business modeling and testing within their organizations. Great business testing leads to true innovation, but most leaders don't understand how to apply the scientific method in their businesses. Osterwalder shares what any owner or entrepreneur can do to build their innovation muscle.

Jak budować markę osobistą w oparciu o Business Model Canvas? W czym może on nam pomóc i jakie są korzyści ze stosowania tego narzędzia? Zapraszam do posłuchania tego odcinka wszystkie osoby, które chcą zacząć budować markę osobistą, ale nie widzą, od czego zacząć...Ten odcinek jest połączeniem podcastu i transmisji na żywo, którą przeprowadziłam na Facebooku. Chcesz zobaczyć prezentację, którą się posługiwałam - wejdź na www.positivemind.pl/44A więcej o marce osobistej w oparciu o Business Model Canvas przeczytasz w książce "Model biznesowy Ty" (T. Clark, A. Osterwalder, Y. Pigneur)

Invitado Especial: Gabriel Pichardo@openstationmx en instagramEste episodio también está disponible en versión de video en YouTube https://youtu.be/R8x9GYRwAwsConsulta www.thomaslasch.com para más detalles.Enlace directo al Taller de Creatividadhttps://thomaslasch.thinkific.com/courses/tcciEnlaces a todas nuestras plataformas digitales:Web y Streaming https://bit.ly/37gAYmJApple Podcasts https://apple.co/2UEnHlmSpreaker https://bit.ly/2U3C4zjSpotify https://spoti.fi/38JpsBEiHeart https://ihr.fm/36zgbe7Google Podcasts https://bit.ly/3aS2xFYYouTube https://bit.ly/31GjMpNStitcher https://bit.ly/31bKVRniVoox https://bit.ly/310IG33PocketCasts https://pca.st/ywtNMixCloud https://bit.ly/2uCEv1eDeezer https://bit.ly/36D3PRTCastBox https://bit.ly/3aRbsYwPodcast Addict https://bit.ly/2O5WGmVTuneIn https://bit.ly/2uJV37pPodTail https://bit.ly/2GrKjgPPodParadise https://bit.ly/2GvNUdSSíguenos en Redes Sociales:Facebook @ideasalairepodcast https://bit.ly/312B3crTwitter @ideasalaire https://bit.ly/312RQMgInstagram @thomas.lasch https://bit.ly/30ZzfRo"Menos reactivos y más CREATIVOS" es parte de @ideasalaire, un podcast en el que te ayudamos a desarrollar tu potencial creativo. Escúchanos en tu plataforma de audio favorita, ya sea iTunes, Spotify, iHeart, Spreaker, SoundCloud, Stitcher, YouTube, iVoox, CastBox, TuneIn y muchos más. Puedes compartir libremente nuestros episodios de Ideas al Aire siempre y cuando los atribuyas con un enlace a http://www.thomaslasch.com. NO puedes crear obras derivadas NI usar este material para fines comerciales sin la autorización por escrito de Thomas Lasch.Licencia Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcodeMúsicas usadas en estos episodios:
Lunatic Morse - Thomas LaschNorth Sea - Silent PartnerYouTube Audio Library

Invitado Especial: Gabriel Pichardo @openstationmx en instagram Este episodio también está disponible en versión de video en YouTube https://youtu.be/R8x9GYRwAws Consulta www.thomaslasch.com para más detalles. Enlace directo al Taller de Creatividad https://thomaslasch.thinkific.com/courses/tcci Enlaces a todas nuestras plataformas digitales: Web y Streaming https://bit.ly/37gAYmJ Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/2UEnHlm Spreaker https://bit.ly/2U3C4zj Spotify https://spoti.fi/38JpsBE iHeart https://ihr.fm/36zgbe7 Google Podcasts https://bit.ly/3aS2xFY YouTube https://bit.ly/31GjMpN Stitcher https://bit.ly/31bKVRn iVoox https://bit.ly/310IG33 PocketCasts https://pca.st/ywtN MixCloud https://bit.ly/2uCEv1e Deezer https://bit.ly/36D3PRT CastBox https://bit.ly/3aRbsYw Podcast Addict https://bit.ly/2O5WGmV TuneIn https://bit.ly/2uJV37p PodTail https://bit.ly/2GrKjgP PodParadise https://bit.ly/2GvNUdS Síguenos en Redes Sociales: Facebook @ideasalairepodcast https://bit.ly/312B3cr Twitter @ideasalaire https://bit.ly/312RQMg Instagram @thomas.lasch https://bit.ly/30ZzfRo "Menos reactivos y más CREATIVOS" es parte de @ideasalaire, un podcast en el que te ayudamos a desarrollar tu potencial creativo. Escúchanos en tu plataforma de audio favorita, ya sea iTunes, Spotify, iHeart, Spreaker, SoundCloud, Stitcher, YouTube, iVoox, CastBox, TuneIn y muchos más. Puedes compartir libremente nuestros episodios de Ideas al Aire siempre y cuando los atribuyas con un enlace a http://www.thomaslasch.com. NO puedes crear obras derivadas NI usar este material para fines comerciales sin la autorización por escrito de Thomas Lasch. Licencia Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Músicas usadas en estos episodios: 
Lunatic Morse - Thomas Lasch North Sea - Silent Partner YouTube Audio Library

Episode 5: From Problem-Focused to Customer-Focused1. The course mentioned in this episode uses the Business Model Canvas: See Business Model Generation. Osterwalder, Alexander & Pigneur, Yves (2010). New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.2. The quote "Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change" in the introduction to the podcast is attributable Dr Wayne Dyer, an internationally renowned author and speaker in the fields of self-development and spiritual growth. Source of quote: Dyer, W. (2009), Success Secrets, Retrieved from https://www.drwaynedyer.com/blog/success-secrets/

Episode 3: How to Turn a Round Apple into Square AppleReferences:1. Reading man and twins puzzle: These puzzles were originally from a 2015 study in the Journal of Problem Solving and reproduced in the book Elastic – Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World. Mlodinow, Leonard (2018). UK, Penguin Books. p 97-98.2. Thinking the Opposite: Some variations of this technique were mentioned in the book Elastic – Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World (see above for detailed reference), p93-94 and Decisive – How to Make Better Decisions. Heath, Chip & Heath, Dan (2013). Great Britain, Random House Books. p 92-114 3. Business Model Canvas: See Business Model Generation. Osterwalder, Alexander & Pigneur, Yves (2010). New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.4. The quote "Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change" in the introduction to the podcast is attributable Dr Wayne Dyer, an internationally renowned author and speaker in the fields of self-development and spiritual growth. Source of quote: Dyer, W. (2009), Success Secrets, Retrieved from https://www.drwaynedyer.com/blog/success-secrets/

How should teams pursue business model innovation? Why should companies “professionalize” innovation? Alex Osterwalder, creator of the Business Model Canvas and co-founder of Strategyzer, explains. Osterwalder also shares insights from his recently published book, Testing Business Ideas. His next book, The Invincible Company, will be out in the spring of 2020.  

Ayudar a comprender que en los modelos de negocio de alta incertidumbre y de alta velocidad de cambio no funciona la forma tradicional de redactar un plan de marketing a 6 ó 12 meses. Debemos utilizar herramientas de diseño de estrategias de ventas de forma iterativa como Sales funnel Canvas. ¿Qué tratamos en el taller? - Cómo conectar Business Model Canvas a Sales Funnel Canvas. Business Model Canvas como herramienta de diseño de modelos de negocio y no como presentación esquemática del business plan. - Relaciones con los clientes, la pieza del Business Model Canvas olvidada por Osterwalder de donde nace Sales Funnel Canvas. - Conceptos de diseño de estrategia de ventas coordinados con el diseño del modelo de negocio. - Matices diferenciadores del diseño de la estrategia de ventas en las diferentes etapas de “encaje problema-solución”, “encaje producto-mercado” y “escalado”.

Ayudar a comprender que en los modelos de negocio de alta incertidumbre y de alta velocidad de cambio no funciona la forma tradicional de redactar un plan de marketing a 6 ó 12 meses. Debemos utilizar herramientas de diseño de estrategias de ventas de forma iterativa como Sales funnel Canvas. ¿Qué tratamos en el taller? - Cómo conectar Business Model Canvas a Sales Funnel Canvas. Business Model Canvas como herramienta de diseño de modelos de negocio y no como presentación esquemática del business plan. - Relaciones con los clientes, la pieza del Business Model Canvas olvidada por Osterwalder de donde nace Sales Funnel Canvas. - Conceptos de diseño de estrategia de ventas coordinados con el diseño del modelo de negocio. - Matices diferenciadores del diseño de la estrategia de ventas en las diferentes etapas de “encaje problema-solución”, “encaje producto-mercado” y “escalado”.

Nuestro emprendedor de hoy comenzó a diseñar y construir modelos de bicicletas de accionamiento manual, handbikes y sillas de ruedas de competición, a partir de su propia necesidad y buscando dar solución a su problema y el de otros.  Hacé clic para Twittear: @FabianPelleriti diseña bicicletas para personas con movilidad reducida. Escuchá la entrevista para enterarte porqué comenzó con este proyecto. Descargá la charla desde acá: http://bit.ly/2K1MSJH Lo más importante Papá de 3 hijos y esposo de Adriana. Desde chico les gustaba andar en bicicleta con amigos. Hizo el servicio militar, ahí pensó que iba a ser el pero año de su vida pero a los 19 años tuvo un accidente ferroviario donde perdió las dos piernas. A los 26 se recibió de Arquitecto en UBA, sin imaginar en qué iban a derivar esos conocimientos aprendidos años después. De joven comenzó a ayudar a su hermano en el rubro joyería, el negocio fue creciendo, siguieron trabajando juntos, pusieron locales y Fabián se retiró en 2017 para poderle toda la energía a su nueva pyme. En el 2003, notó que se estaba yendo en peso, queriendo frenar ese avance, contrató un personal trainer y comenzó a hacer gimnasia. Eso derivó en querer hacer bicicleta y compró una hand-bike en el exterior. En 2005 empezó a meterse en carreras y maratones. Queriendo avanzar en su rendimiento en las competiciones, empezó a pensar en diseñar su propia hand-bike diseñada a su medida y lo hizo. Creó Rodamax, que trata de ayudas técnicas para personas con discapacidad para deportes adaptados, focalizado en atletismo y ciclismo. El mejor consejo de negocios lo recibió de un mentor mientras hacía el programa “Vos lo hacés” de GCBA, donde ahora es tutor ad honorem, él le aconsejó que analice su negocios según la teoría del Canvas de Osterwalder. Apps sugeridas Adwords WhatsApp Instagram Libro que recomienda Pasion por emprender de Andy Friere Podés contactarte con Fabián por: WhatsApp: +54911-4414-7122 Instagram y Facebook como rodamax.argentina Si te gustó el programa: Suscribite al Podcast en iTunes o Spotify para enterarte cuando publico nuevos episodios. Podés calificar el programa en iTunes escribiendo una breve reseña desde acá. Seguime en: Instagram Facebook Twitter Gracias por escuchar! Hasta la próxima semana! Moses Levy

In this episode, Marc interviews Joe Harper during a webinar originally held for the CareerPivot community membership site. Listen in to learn how you can apply the resources of your field SBD Center in all stages of your business, but especially as you prepare to start and grow it.   Key Takeaways: [1:00] Marc welcomes you to episode 77 of the Repurpose Your Career podcast. Marc invites you to share this podcast with like-minded souls. Please subscribe, share it on social media, write an honest iTunes review, or tell your neighbors and colleagues. [1:18] Next week, Marc interviews Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, the Executive Director of The Texas State Small Business Development Center. The episode will address how people grow happier in the second half of life. [1:51] Marc announces plans for another “Can You Repurpose Your Career?” series, similar to Episodes 48-51 from October 2017. If you would like to go through this process anonymously, with Marc on the podcast, please email Marc at Podcast@CareerPivot.com. [2:02] This week’s episode is the audio portion of a webinar Marc did with Joe Harper, the Executive Director of the Texas State Small Business Development Center. This webinar was given for the CareerPivot community membership site on how to utilize your Small Business Development Center, the hidden gem in almost every community. [3:16] Marc introduces Joe Harper who directs the webinar. [3:45] Joe gives the background of the Small Business Development Centers. There are over 1,100 centers in 64 states and U.S. territories starting in the early 1980s. There are 4,000 advisers in their team, nationwide. [4:45] The SBD program provides technical assistance in the form of mentorship and training to businesses from the idea stage to the high-growth stage. Most of the focus is on businesses in the idea stage, from concept to credit. [6:48] An adviser helps you design a strategy for executing the launch of your business, and the expansion and long-term growth of your business, up to a plan for exiting the business at the right time. Joe once tried to give his business to his son. His son declined the opportunity. [8:03] Joe explains the mission and goals of the SBDCs. They track numbers of jobs they help create, help save and expand, the number of business they help create, and capital infusion. In the Austin area, their capital impact is about $75 million, annually. [9:15] Joe talks about the SBDC’s role in matching a business’s financial projections and their business plan. There is planning where the money will come from, how you will use it, and how you will repay it. Sources for capital are discussed. Different programs exist for businesses at different stages. [11:52] Joe introduces the program of the lean canvas or the nine building blocks of the business model developed by Dr. Osterwalder to predict accurately the success of your business plan and help you develop your pro forma or financial projections. Managing the cash is key. [15:16] SBDC advisers look at three things in terms of a business’s ability to grow: 1. Do they have a willingness to grow? 2. Do they have experience in what growth looks like? 3. Do they have the capacity to grow internally and externally? [16:24] The transition into a high-growth company usually comes with the realization that there will be awkward decisions about changing staff. [18:01] In an online business, your digital footprint is your business. SBDC advisers spend a lot of time working with business owners on their social media strategy, websites, and tools to develop online customer relationships and understanding what customer needs and expectations are going to be. What is their value proposition? [20:20] How do you find your nearest Small Business Development Center? Look at ASDBC.org. Find your lead center. They will direct you to your local field center. The local centers are also listed on the SBA.gov website. Different field centers will have different areas of technology or business expertise. One SBCD can refer you to another. [22:46] The whole focus is on what’s best for the client. [22:58] The businesses SBDC helps are for profit. Nonprofits can get help from SCORE. [23:44] A new client of the SBDC is first advised about their business idea. There is help for every level, from ideation to exit. Some SBDCs have certified business valuators. [28:10] Joe talks about taxes and regulations that are being pulled off the books. The new tax law allows certain assets to be expensed in the first year. Caution: an expense is not a depreciation. Joe talks about tax mitigation vs. growth and value. [32:37] What about positioning yourself as a business as an author? It is difficult to measure the economic return on the taxpayer investment in an author or other one-person small businesses. [30:42] Mark tells how he has researched optimum job titles through Google. Make it a relevant title for the future, not for today, or for the past. Don’t say MSDOS programmer. [37:04] Marc invites you to check back next week to hear him interview Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50.   Mentioned in This Episode: Careerpivot.com CareerPivot.com/Episode-48 “Can Tim Repurpose His Career? Part 1” CareerPivot.com/Episode-49 “Can Tim Repurpose His Career? Part 2” CareerPivot.com/Episode-50 “Can Tim Repurpose His Career? Part 3” CareerPivot.com/Episode-51 “Can Tim Repurpose His Career? Part 4” Austin Small Business Development Center The Business Model Canvas developed by Dr. Alexander Osterwalder ASBDC.org listing every SBDC in the country. SCORE.org Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 James A. Michener The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, by Jonathan Rauch Please pick up a copy of Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life, by Marc Miller and Susan Lahey. The paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats are available now. When you have completed reading the book, Marc would very much appreciate your leaving an honest review on Amazon.com. The audio version of the book is available on iTunes app, Audible, and Amazon. Marc has the paid membership community running on the CareerPivot.com website. The website is alive and in production. Marc is contacting people on the waitlist. Sign up for the waitlist at CareerPivot.com/Community. Marc has three initial cohorts of 10 members in the second half of life and they are guiding him on what to build. He is looking for individuals for the fourth cohort who are motivated to take action and give Marc input on what he should produce next. He’s currently working on LinkedIn, blogging, and book publishing training. Marc is bringing someone in to guide members on how to write a book. The next topic will be business formation and there will be lots of other things. Ask to be put on the waiting list to join a cohort. This is a unique paid membership community where Marc will offer group coaching, special content, mastermind groups, and a community where you can seek help. CareerPivot.com/Episode-77 Show Notes for this episode. Please subscribe at CareerPivot.com to get updates on all the other happenings at Career Pivot. Marc publishes a blog with Show Notes every Tuesday morning. If you subscribe to the Career Pivots blog, every Sunday you will receive the Career Pivot Insights email, which includes a link to this podcast. Please take a moment — go to iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify through the Spotify app. Give this podcast an honest review and subscribe! If you’re not sure how to leave a review, please go to CareerPivot.com/review, and read the detailed instructions there. Email Marc at Podcast@CareerPivot.com. Contact Marc, and ask questions at Careerpivot.com/contact-me You can find Show Notes at Careerpivot.com/repurpose-career-podcast. To subscribe from an iPhone: CareerPivot.com/iTunes To subscribe from an Android: CareerPivot.com/Android Careerpivot.com

This week’s guest is Alexander Osterwalder. The man behind «Business Model Canvas», and one of the world’s sharpest thinkers within innovation and business development.   “If you’re competing on product, services or price, it is much easier to be disrupted. I think all competition is moving away from product- and technology-innovation because it is hard. It is moving towards something that gives protection.” “The only thing giving better protection right now is a better business model. Or, even larger, like Amazon, a better organizational structure that allows you to continuously produce new business models. Those are what I call the invincible companies.” In this episode: *Why big companies find it hard to innovate *The difference between execution and exploration *Why product alone is not enough to survive *The seven questions to assess your business model. -------------------------------------------------------------- Ukens gjest er "Business Model Canvas"-skaperen Alexander Osterwalder. Han er en av verdens fremste eksperter på forretningsmodeller og innovasjon. I denne episoden snakker han om: *Hvorfor store selskaper sliter med å innovere *Forskjellen på "execution" og "exploration" *Hvorfor et godt produkt alene ikke er nok for å overleve *De syv viktigste spørsmålene du bør stille til din forretningsmodell *Viktigheten av å feile og å tenke langsiktig   I studio: Alexander Osterwalder, CEO Strategyzer Lucas Weledeghebriel, journalist i Shifter.   PS: Takk til Nordic Business Forum for muligheten til å intervjue Osterwalder. PS2: Beklager dårlig lyd i denne episoden.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alexander Osterwalder is the Co-Founder of Strategyzer and author of, “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” and “Business Model You: A One-Page Method For Reinventing Your Career.” Osterwalder gives his recommendations on what people should do when writing business plans. He shares his thoughts on whether entrepreneurs should just skip writing business plans and just “do” instead.   He then discusses how much time one should spend on planning vs operating a business.   Dr. Alexander Osterwalder works as an independent author, speaker and advisor with a particular focus on business model innovation, strategic management and management innovation. He regularly performs keynote speeches and workshops on the topic of business model innovation in companies, in business schools and at conferences around the world.   Besides his independent activities he is partner at Arvetica, a consulting boutique focusing on the private banking and wealth management industry. His role includes business development and the management of a peer knowledge exchange platform for senior executives in private banking. The platform aims at helping senior executives and private banking professionals understand the changing industry landscape, notably from other leading personalities, such as CEOs of top Swiss and international banks.   Before that Dr. Osterwalder founded and ran BusinessModelDesign.com, a consulting boutique active in strategy consulting with a focus on business model innovation. He also helped develop and implement the strategy and business concept of a globally active not for profit network called The Constellation for over one year in Thailand. The Constellation brought knowledge management methods from the private sector (particularly BP) to the health sector to better respond to the challenges of HIV/AIDS and Malaria.   Dr. Osterwalder has a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems (MIS) from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he worked as a teaching and research assistant and published extensively. He also developed and taught a seminar on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D).   Previously, he was active as an entrepreneur in the banking sector and as an online business journalist for BILANZ. He is an inaugural member of the Open World Initiative (OWI) of the Evian Group at IMD, Switzerland.   Visit Strategyzer at www.Strategyzer.com.   Learn more about Osterwalder's business tips at www.businessmodelgeneration.com andwww.businessmodelalchemist.com.    Find out more about Alex Osterwalder at www.alexosterwalder.com.

Entrepreneur and business model innovator Alexander Osterwalder discusses dynamic, yet simple-to-use tools for visualizing, challenging and re-inventing business models. Osterwalder articulates how to use the visual language of his business model canvas framework, and shares stories of how this approach helps organizations of all sizes to better create, deliver and capture value.

Entrepreneur and business model innovator Alexander Osterwalder discusses dynamic, yet simple-to-use tools for visualizing, challenging and re-inventing business models. Osterwalder articulates how to use the visual language of his business model canvas framework, and shares stories of how this approach helps organizations of all sizes to better create, deliver and capture value.

Entrepreneur and business model innovator Alexander Osterwalder discusses dynamic, yet simple-to-use tools for visualizing, challenging and re-inventing business models. Osterwalder articulates how to use the visual language of his business model canvas framework, and shares stories of how this approach helps organizations of all sizes to better create, deliver and capture value.

Materials like Bi-Sb alloys, Bi2Se3 or Bi2Te3 have been known and studied for decades, mostly for their interesting thermoelectrical properties. They are insulators with relatively small band gaps, which are opened by the spin-orbit interaction. Recently, it was recognized that the topology of the electronic states separated by this gap is non-trivial. Jürg Osterwalder gives an introduction to the new aspects of these materials.