Yves Pigneur

meeting and interesting discussion with Alexandre Joyce, designer, about his thesis on sustainability, business models and design. Last year, we started to work on the idea of three “layers” of sustainable business models: business, ecological and social. The model seems to be much more mature, and has been applied in several contexts and workshops.

Alexandre travaille pur l’Institut de développement de produits, “une association à but non lucratif dont la mission est d’accélérer l’adoption de meilleures pratiques en développement de produits et en écoconception afin de rendre les entreprises plus compétitives” (more). Alexandre va prochainement animer un “Atelier d’innovation par les modèles d’affaires”.

Alexandre est aussi assistant de recherche à Concordia et travaille sur un projet de recherche en “tessellation” (wikipedia) qui a pour objectif de définir l’ADN des objets sur base de leur forme.

super discussion with Bänz Ledin, founder and CEO of SpotMe (web), on the event management and business models

“SpotMe, founded in 2001, provides powerful and reliable mobile app platform, enabling the design and delivery of more productive and enjoyable event experiences … ” (more)

Discussion with François Briod (@BriodF), co-founder of Tawipay (web), a comparison website for money transfer services

The discussion also concerned “Growth hacking”, term coined by Sean Ellis (web), “a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure (wikipedia)

See also a recent blog post ob WSJ, entitled ‘Growth Hacking’ Helps Startups Boost Their Users: Strategy Includes Data-Driven Experiments and Online Tactics (blog). The discipline of marketing is ‘shifting from people-centric to API-centric activities’, dixit Andrew Chen (blog). Nice examples on the Growth hackers web.

PhD defence by Boris Fritscher of his thesis entitled “Computer-Aided Business Model Design”, with the thesis committee: Prof. Jos van Hillegersberg (Twente University), Alain Wegmann (EPFL) and Thibault Estier (HEC)

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the functionality that is necessary in a computer-aided design tool in a strategic context, specifically in the design of business models. The research question can be stated as follows: “How can computer-aided design help in designing and assessing strategic business objects, such as business models?”

see Boris’s prototypes (web) (more…)

fruitful meeting with Eric Dubois (web), a longtime friend, in charge of the “Service science & innovation” center at Tudor Luxembourg (CRPHT), expert in service design and enterprise modelling.

The Service Science & Innovation is an interdisciplinary centre dedicated to an approach that is grounded in the science of service innovation, based on the emerging interdisciplinary field of science called ’Service Science, Management and Engineering’ (more).

meeting and rich discussion with Sam Schneider, founder and partner of CustomFuture (web), on service design, user experience and business model design

“CustomFuture has successfully applied Guerrilla Innovation to turn everything from health-care services over smart-phone appliances to cars into unforgettable and sticking experiences that sell (more)

Sam and his colleagues invented, improved and experimented an awesome method for designing services. One of the main issue now is to package this method and link it to business model design. Sam’s quote: “with the business model, we have the foundations, now let’s build the house on them”. Our discussion is well related to the back-and-forth approach we are developing in our new “Value Proposition Design” book.

Noerd (web) is a nice location, also headquarter and factory of Freitag (web) …

visit at the Hangout (web), recently launched by City University London, with Adrian Cheok, and then his research lab

The Hangout is an interactive environment where talent meets tech. They foster relationships between academics, students and graduates from City University London and Tech entrepreneurs (similar to La Forge on the Dorigny campus).

Adrian Cheok has been working on research covering mixed reality, human-computer interfaces, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing, fuzzy systems, embedded systems and power electronics (web), and interesting demo of his last research on “New digital smell technology transforms smartphones into smell-o-phones” (CBS)

meeting with Prof. Poh Kam Wong (NUS), Prof. Chris Tucci and his team at EPFL on business model innovation.

Poh Kam presented his ideas on how to design social business models, suggesting that for designing good business models one needs to consider other models: stakeholders, financing and social purpose.

The Chris’s team works on several research projects on business model innovation and design:

The principal objective of a (Swiss NSF) Sinergia project is to explore and clarify the nature of the mechanisms and dynamics underlying the emergence and evolution of new and existing Business Models.

A (EU) FutureEnterprise aims at opening new avenues for Internet-based Enterprise innovation by supporting and coordinating the research activities from the perspective as well as for the benefit of enterprises, on the basis of an open mentality to bridge the past (FP7) with the future (Horizon 2020).

The objective of the a MEDiATE (business models for the elderly) project is to develop and test innovative business models that will hopefully facilitate and enhance the uptake of the MEDiATE solution into well developed as well as emerging markets.

visit and seminar by Prof. Poh Kam Wong, head of NUS Enterprise (web), on the EPFL/Unil campus, presenting his paper entitled “Performance Feedback, Financial Slack and the Innovation Behavior of Firms” (with Lydia Lu)

We examine the effect of a firm’s performance feedback on its innovation behavior. Building on Cyert and March’s (1963) behavioral theory of the firm, we develop specific hypotheses about how firms adjust their exploratory and exploitative innovation activities in response to performance feedback, and how this adjustment is moderated by the firms’ financial slack. Empirical evidence from a panel data covering 323 Taiwanese electronics firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) over 1998- 2011 is consistent with our theoretical predictions. In particular, we found that firms reduce both exploratory and exploitative innovation activities, but more so the former, in response to further improvement in performance when their performance is above their aspiration level. In contrast, firms increase exploratory innovation activities but decrease exploitative innovation ones in response to deteriorating performance when their performance is below their aspiration level. In addition, our results show that financial slack has a different moderating effect on the link between performance feedback and innovation when firm performance is above or below its aspiration levels.

(info)

Brian Donovan (web) took the initiative to collect fresh questions that we could ask about technology leadership.

“There is now plenty of expert commentary on addressing the leadership challenge of exponentially accelerating technology change. … Plenty of answers, but what is the fresh question that we could ask about the dilemma of rising expectations of technology leaders on the one hand and increasing dissatisfaction with IT on the other?

I suggest …

If you think Information Technology will change the art of possible, are you sure your company is not forgetting to renew its business model?

inspired by “If you think you understand a problem, make sure you are not deceiving yourself.’, comment of Albert Einstein to Reg Revans, the father of Action Learning.