Yves Pigneur

Shin Yamamoto, with Yasuhiro Watanabe, launched the initiative “Hero de BMGEN” with kids and parents who design and draw together mind maps, empathy maps and business models in a highly ludic way. This time the 3-hour workshop was held in the Freewill prep school, in Episu suburb. Nice Sunday! Interesting meeting also with several teachers of an elementary school near Osaka using the BMGEN canvas with their students.

A video by another teacher having used the BMGNE canvas with his students, in North of Japan:

2-day fruitful meeting with Jerry Engel (UC Berkeley) and Wong Poh Kam, head of NUS Enterprise Center

Built on Stanford University’s Lean LaunchPad, in collaboration with UC Berkeley and NCIIA (web), Jerry Engel and Steve Blank prepared for NSF (iCorp) and teach a course for teaching entrepreneurship and the Lean LaunchPad approach (based on the Business Model Canvas and Customer Development).

The meeting aims at exploring how to adapt the Lean Launchpad Program to SIngapore/Asia.

We also had a long interesting discussion on the recent and future extensions of BMGEN, such as the Value Proposition Designer (VPD), BM economics, and BM dynamics.

A brief update on social business models …

In 2010, with Alex, we co-authored a book chapter entitled ’Aligning Profit and Purpose Through Business Model Innovation’ which provided managers and entrepreneurs a guide to designing innovative business models that can help them profitably improve the firm’s social and environmental footprint (see previous post).

Since then, a couple of papers have been recently published, which propose various typologies of business models for the social enterprises. Some of them have adopted and adapted the BMGEN canvas for developing their own frameworks (briefly presented below, even if I am not always convinced by their extension …)

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and another interview on CNN, on 3rd January 2013, by Nick Glass.

(CNN)

Creaholic used the BMGEN canvas for several projects, such as a breakthrough electronic shower that drastically diminishes the consumption of water and energy compared to a conventional shower (internship by Charles-Henry Dubey, HEC Lausanne).

Elmar has co-authored with Giles Garel the book “La Fabrique de l’innovation”, which presents the creation of the Swatch watch.

The book uses and presents the “C-K theory” (wikipedia), “a concept-knowledge theory which is both a design theory and a theory of reasoning in design”, developed by Armand Hatchuel and Benoît Weil (Ecole des Mines, Paris).

I also use the C-K theory in my class for the PhD programme “Design science research in IS” organised this year by CUSO (web). With Jan Ondrus, we authored the paper “C-K design theory for information systems research” at DESRIST’09.

Talk and chat with Andrew Ng, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and co-founder of Coursera (web), during a NUS School of Computing seminar.

“We are at the cusp of a major transformation in higher education. In the past year, we have seen the advent of MOOCs – massively open online classes (MOOCs) – top-quality courses from the best universities offered for free. (…). At Coursera, as of December 2012, we offer over 200 courses from our 33 university partners, and have over 2 million students from 196 countries. (more)

An example of course on Coursera, using the BMGEN canvas, is “Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies” by James Green, University of Maryland (coursera).

There is another similar platform, Udacity, on which one can find the course by Steve Blank “How to Build a Startup – The Lean LaunchPad” (udacity).

EPFL also launched a MOOC platform (moocs) in Lausanne. An example of course is “Functional Programming Principles in Scala” by Martin Odersky (web). EPFL President Patrick Aebischer has recently announced a “few weeks” sabbatical in Africa to study the french speaking distance learning needs and expectations (TSR).

An interesting look and reflection on the “The Future of Colleges & Universities” (web) is given by Thomas Frey, so-called futurist speaker, even if a little bit outdated (2009). His intro metaphor of the “Roman numerals”, which were a huge system problem and prevented an entire civilization from furthering the field of math and science, is amazing. His provocative contention is that our university system could be the equivalent of Roman numerals, preventing us from doing great things.

A recent more critical view on online courseware (Forbes), Why Online Courseware Can’t Replace A 4-Year Degree, by Eric Savitz

and a last post on TechCrunch entitled Coursera Takes A Big Step Toward Monetization, Now Lets Students Earn ’Verified Certificates’ For A Fee (blog)

Another recent article on FastCompany THE WORLD’S TOP 10 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES IN EDUCATION

Some more general references on the future of universities and business school:

Christensen, C., Eyring, H. (2011) The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, Jossey-Bass (amazon)

Khurana, R. (2010) From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, Princeton University Press (amazon)

Weisbrod, b., , Ballou, J., Asch, E. (2010) Mission and Money: Understanding the University, Cambridge University Press (amazon)

Nice meeting and interesting chat with Robin Speculand, I met at SMU a couple of weeks ago. Robin is the author of the book “Bricks to Bridges” (amazon) and the CEO of Bridges Business (web).

His interests concern a topic we barely addressed in the BMGEN book and workshops: the strategy execution.

His “implementation compass” is a 8-point framework to guide organisations in implementation of their strategy.

“The Implementation Compass’ helps identify the actions you need to take today to deliver tomorrow’s strategy. It allows organizations to assess their implementation readiness, identify the key areas to tackle and most importantly, take the right actions on a day-to-day basis that will deliver long-term performance. (more)

Robin is also launching a new portal for strategy implementation success (site), with videos, one of them explaining why business models can fail (video).

soutenance et jury de thèse d’Alexandre Renaud (cv) intitulée «Traduire pour aligner, une analyse par les pratiques de la conduite de projets de reconfigurations de systèmes d’information», dirigée par notre collègue le Professeur Michel Kalika (blog) à Paris Dauphine.

Cette thèse présente une jolie réflexion, riche et originale, sur l’alignement stratégique dans la conduite de projets de systèmes d’information aux seins des organisations. L’objectif du travail de thèse était d’étudier la dynamique organisationnelle à l’origine de la réussite ou de l’échec des projets de systèmes d’information dans les organisations. L’originalité de la démarche a été de se distancer de l’approche prescriptive et normative traditionnelle en s’inscrivant dans le courant de la stratégie par les pratiques et en mobilisant la théorie dite de la traduction ou de l’acteur-réseau.

“IMD and the Evian Group had the privilege of hosting the dynamic leader of Haier Electronics. CEO Zhang Ruimin shared his personal experience developing Haier into the global brand it is today. (more)

Bill Fischer with Fang Liu and Umberto Lago wrote a case on Haier; they use the BMGEN canvas for presenting the evolution of its business models. This case is based on their upcoming book Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform (web)

NUS-Stanford Roundtable on “Innovative Models for Start-Up Incubation in Asia” at NUS Business School.

“The aim of the roundtable is to foster learning exchange among the leading thinkers and doers in Asia who are pioneering new models for accelerating technology commercialization through the incubation of startups in their respective institutions and countries. The roundtable plans to have 8-10 such innovative practice-leaders from different Asian economies to reflect the diversity of development contexts and innovation ecosystems in Asia, ranging from the technologically more advanced economies of Japan, Korea and Taiwan, to the large economies of India and China, and selected Southeast Asian economies (Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia).”

Nice talks and interesting discussions with heads of the incubators in Asia (both private and public ones): Japan, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Singapore. No unique model, a large variety of business models for incubators. Several of them already adopted the Business Model Canvas.