Yves Pigneur

We arrived in Tokyo, for 3 weeks and a series of keynotes/workshops/meetings, at the University of Tokyo (iSchool), Japan Innovation Network (JIN), Business Model Innovation Association (BMIA), entrepreneurs and large corporations, and a last talk for the launch event of the Japanese translation of “Value Proposition Design”, organised by the publisher Shoesha (VPDesign).

fruitful meeting and discussion on business models with Christian Nielsen, on sabbatical in Sydney

“His Business Model Design Center (BMDC) is a interdisciplinary research center focusing on business models. BMDC functions as a natural hub between the technology-based research environments and the business oriented research environments. All activities are focused on the core activity: Business Model Design, in the processes of entrepreneurship, commercialization, and internationalization (more)

He recently wrote a review of our book “Value Proposition Canvas” for the “Journal of Business Model”

One-day workshop by Dave Gray on Culture Map, organised by Business Model Inc. at Amsterdam (web)

Experimentation of the last version of the Culture Map in collaboration w/ Strategyzer (see our previous post here). See the slideshare deck here

short visit at the kick-off of the “China Hardware Innovation Camp (CHIC)”, launched and organised by Marc Laperrouza (web)

“CHIC will allow EPFL, ECAL and HEC students to discover one of the most dynamic hubs for hardware innovation [...] During the semester the students will have to interact with a local prototyping company to make their project a success. In addition they will have the opportunity to understand the Hong Kong/Shenzhen eco-system by visiting some leading organizations in Southern China (Huawei, Foxconn, Hong Kong Science & Technology Park, etc.). (more)

Doctoral thesis committee for María Camila Ochoa Jaramillo’s thesis entitled ’Capacity Adequacy in International Electricity Markets’, supervised by Prof. Ann van Ackere, HEC Lausanne.

“Electricity is a strategic service in modern societies. Thus, it is extremely important for governments to be able to guarantee an affordable and reliable supply, which depends to a great extent on an adequate expansion of the generation and transmission capacities. Cross-border integration of electricity markets creates new challenges for the regulators, since the evolution of the market is now influenced by the characteristics and policies of neighbouring countries. [...] Camila Ochoa developed a simulation model to analyse under what circumstances integration is desirable. This model is used to study three cases of interconnection between two countries.

Doctoral thesis committee for Biljana Bajić’s thesis entitled ’Animation-Based Service Specification, Verification and Validation’, supervised by Prof. Alain Wegmann, EPFL.

“Service specifications are used to represent the service systems on different levels of abstraction: from business down to IT. High-level service specifications are mostly used for the communication among different participants, to catalyze the discussions between them, but only service specifications modeling IT systems have enough details to be simulated and executed. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to create precise specifications on high-level of abstraction, potentially leading to severe project problems. This can be compensated with use of formal methods and code generation techniques to get abstract, yet precise specifications, whose services can be simulated and prototyped. By capturing design decisions, the high-level service specifications can be refined into more detailed ones with possibility to validate the specification at any level of abstraction.

Discussion with Martin Odersky (web), president of the thesis committee, and … father of the programming language Scala (web)

Présentation de BMGEN/VPDesign au Groupe d’Ecologie industrielle de Lausanne, invité par Prof. Suren Erkman (lift)

L’objectif de cette présentation est de découvrir le “Business Model Canvas” pour décrire, remettre en question et esquisser des business models et leurs proposition de valeur , mais aussi explorer le “design thinking” et le “lean startup” pour prototype et tester les business models.

Discussion sur un éventuel projet commun dans le programme VolteFace (web) …

Doctoral thesis committee for Andrea Giessmann’s thesis entitled ’Designing Business Models of Cloud Platforms’, supervised by Prof. Christine Legner and co-supervised by Dr Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, with Prof. Niels Bjørn-Andersen (Copenhagen Business School), as external referee.

“First, based on case study research, the thesis provides a deeper understanding of current Platform as a Service (PaaS) business models and their evolution. Second, it analyses and simulates consumers’ preferences regarding PaaS business models, using a conjoint approach to find out what determines the choice of cloud platforms. [...] The third part introduces a design theory for the emerging class of PaaS business models, which is grounded on an extensive action design research study with a large European software vendor.

Nice skype chat with Alex and Dave Gray (blog) discussing his Culture Map. “Toolsmiths at work” dixit Alex …

Dave authored two interesting books: “Game storming” and “The Connected Company”. His company XPLANE has also drawn business model cases for BMGEN. Last year, he participated to our Business Design Summit (post) when he first introduced his Culture Map: “a tool that organizations can use to assess, map and transform their cultures. The Culture Map tool is still in the prototype stage and I am currently testing it with organizations large and small … (more)

Different culture maps or canvases

Présentation de start-ups hébergées dans l’Accélérateur Banque Nationale – HEC Montréal, lors du Salon de la PME à HEC et remise du prix Fond de solidarité FTQ

L’Accélérateur a pour mission d’accompagner, d’appuyer des entrepreneurs et d’accélérer des projets d’entreprises innovants émanant d’étudiants et de diplômés en provenance des 3 institutions formant Campus Montréal (HEC Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal et Université de Montréal) more