Business Model Alchemist

Today I was invited to do a lecture/workshop at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in Jeffrey Huang’s class on the Interactive City where they discuss the future of banking architecture. Jef is at the forefront of design thinking and has taught and worked at Harvard, Stanford’s d.school and at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab. He also operates his own consulting firm Convergeo. He is currently building up the design lab at EPFL.

I used the opportunity for a webcast with Jef because his thoughts on design thinking and business are really interesting. I must apologize that I bullied him into this, but it was well worth it. Thanks Jef (and sorry for pushing)!

The lecture/workshop I did in Jef’s class was on “visualizing private banking strategy and business models”… I’ll make the slides available in my next blogpost.

The International Herald Tribune features an interesting article about Blyk, a Finnish telco that is planning to offer free advertising-supported mobile phone communications. Now that is business model innovation! Beyond being pro/con ad-supported business models there is no doubt that Blyk has done something very innovative… Find a sketch of their business model below:

This weekend, during an Evian Group meeting at the IMD business school, I seized the opportunity to do a short video interview with Kamal Quadir. Kamal is founder of CellBazaar and one of the most interesting entrepreneurs I know. The start-up he created at MIT Media Lab provides an electronic marketplace that can be accessed by mobile phone and Bangladesh is the first market they’re tackling.

Listen to the videocast about CellBazaar’s business model and learn from Kamal how to succeed in doing business in a developing country / emerging market:

The three things I would like to highlight from the chat Kamal and I had this weekend are:

1. if your business model is innovative enough there are lucrative business opportunities in developing countries.
2. if you are perseverant and disruptive you can succeed in an honest way without paying bribes and withoug having to rely on personal connections.
3. successful business initiatives like CellBazaar bring increased efficiency and thus “development” to developing countries. This is much more powerful than the charitable (giving) aid approach, which I have stopped to believe in.

Kamal, I wish you good luck with your undertakings because your work is really relevant!

By the way, Kamal and I are both members of the Open World Initiative (OWI), which is part of the Evian Group and which you might want to check out if you’re interested in the fate of the global community and you believe in a liberal society governed by a multilateral rule-based system.

Last Thursday I used the case study I recently designed together with Prof Yves Pigneur in a class at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. It was a premiere. The case is about Ticketcorner, the leading Swiss ticketing organization which is expanding on the European market and is already figuring in the top 3.

It was great fun to teach, the case seemed to work out and the students did very well. Unfortunately the multimedia material consisting of several interviews with the exec team and some pictures of the Ticketcorner wasn’t yet entirely ready.

The case works very nicely to illustrate the business model concept. You can download the Ticketcorner case study as well as the slides that I used in class.

I started with a class discussion on the main issues, which I ended with an interview with Philipp Gihr, COO of Ticketcorner. Then I got the students to do a role play where one person was the CEO and the other one a CNBC interviewer. After that I showed the interview I did with George Egloff, Ticketcorner’s CEO. In a next step students moved into a break-out sesssion where they sketched different chunks of Ticketcorner’s business model on a big sheet of paper, which they subsequently presented to the whole class. At the end they were supposed to reflect on business model innovation – but since it was already overtime I let them do that at home…

Of course you can use the case study for your own purpose as long as you respect the creative commons license and reference the authors for their contribution.

(The case was prepared with the funding of the Swiss Virtual Campus (CasIS project) and is published under a creative commons attribution 2.5 license)

Update: Business Model Innovation Book. We are currently writing a groundbreaking book on business model innovation (publication: June 2009). You can get special privileges and participate in the innovative business model of our book project on our book chunk platform

Today I read a blogpost by Steve Portigal on design and business and discovered a great new tool to upload, store and share powerpoint presentations on the web.

I immediately used it to share a deck of slides I designed to outline the business model concept. The slides briefly outline my understanding of what a business model actually is and how the concept can be used as a business model design template to quickly design and describe the business logic of a company. The template can also be applied together with the business model innovation cycle which I described in an earlier post.

The slides come under a creative commons license and I actively encourage their re-use – as long as the author (alex osterwalder) is mentioned and the license is respected. I’m also interested in your feedback if you’ve applied the template or plan to apply it (email me at my new company: osterwalder(-at-)gmail.com).

Warning: this is not about business today….

This evening I watched “Hotel Rwanda” and I was deeply touched and terribly ashamed – by myself. Where was I in 1994, what did I do? I was 20 years old and the images passed by… terrible, yes, but I didn’t go to the street…

2 years ago I started getting interested in Rwanda. I read General Romeo Dallaire’s book “Shake Hands with the Devil“, which explained the conflict in Rwanda from the UN field perspective. Dallaire was the commanding UN officer. He did all he could – he tried everything. It was terrible. He couldn’t stop the atrocities. And with that I don’t just mean what happened in Rwanda itself (more than 800′000 people killed in about 100 days – wiki / Human Rights Watch), but what happened in the UN security council – in Washington, Paris, London, Moscow and Beijing… We, the Western countries, failed because we had a genocide in our hands. I, as a person, failed because I didn’t try to influence my and other Western governements with the little means that I have… Terrible things only happen because we don’t inhibit them!

No, this is not about business design today… because business design only matters in a world where we can live free of fear. And sometimes it seems so strange to me that we can seriously talk of a “global village” or a “flat world” while Darfur and other places are covered by dark clouds… And to those that think it doesn’t matter: think twice and then make your point on my blog!

Today Laurent Haug of Ballpark and organizer of LIFT passed by at our offices. He stopped at arvetica to give us some advice on our web/blog sketches, since he is a “Vordenker” of the whole Web2.0 movement around Geneva and the rest of Western Switzerland.

I really recommend you subscribe to the LIFT 07 conference next February if you happen to be around Geneva or can come (I subscribed today…). The conference is all about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society and the speakers come from extremely rich and fascinating backgrounds. Have a look at the current program, which features Stephanie Hannon (Google), Robert Scoble (blog/technology evangelist), Paola Ghillani (fair trade) and and and (too many to mention).

The conference will be participatory and on one of the days anybody can actually organize a session. It will work like this:

1. anybody can propose a talk
2. a digg-like interface will be created where LIFTers can dig the speeches they like the most
3. the top speeches will be scheduled

Last but not least: Don’t forget it’s winter/skiing season – the reason why the weekend session of LIFT is taking place in the mountains…

AND… I would love to offer anybody who wants a coffee at our arvetica offices in downtown Geneva, Switzerland