Yves Pigneur

Osterwalder, A, Pigneur, Y. (2011) Aligning Profit and Purpose Through Business Model Innovation, in Palazzo, G. Wentland, M. (eds) Responsible Management Practices for the 21st Century, Pearson International, p. 61-76.

Traditionally, companies separate their profit seeking activities and activities related to generating a positive social and environmental impact. The former usually represents the core focus of a company, while the latter is added on, generally as a not-for-profit entity under the label of corporate social responsibility. Yet, a growing number of first-time and experienced entrepreneurs and executives around the world are not satisfied with this way of operating anymore. They believe that financial profits and a substantial positive impact are not mutually exclusive and they aim to build powerful new business models that do not settle with financial profits, but have a deeper purpose — to achieve a positive economic, social and environmental impact. In other words, they set out to design and implement business models in which the profit-seeking activities amplify the positive impact, rather than coming at the expense of profits.

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Fang, G., Pigneur, Y. (2010) The configuration and performance of international innovation networks: some evidence from the Chinese software industry. Int. J. Learning and Intellectual Capital (IJLTM), Vol. 7, Issue 2, p. 167-187

Research in social networks has demonstrated that firms in changing environments will benefit from innovation networks. However, the lack of consensus on what factors and how these factors impact performance impedes further research in this area. In this paper, the concept of an International Innovation Network (IIN) and its performance is clarified. Then, based on reviews of the social network and knowledge management literatures, along with the results of previous empirical studies, we clarify the relationships between the performance of a focal firm entering an IIN and each configuration, such as the network structure (range and density), network relationship (tie strength, duration and norm distance) and network position (centrality). We conduct a case study from the Chinese software industry to test our conclusions and then propose an integrative model. We also come up with some efforts that the firm can make in order to improve its performance. Finally, future research is discussed.

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Bonazzi, R., Fritscher, B., Pigneur, Y. (2010) Business Model Considerations for Privacy Protection in a Mobile Location Based Context, Proc. of Business Models for Mobile Platforms (BMMP), Berlin, October, © IEEE

In this paper we discuss the main privacy issues around mobile business models and we envision new solutions having privacy protection as a main value proposition. We construct a framework to help analyze the situation and assume that a third party is necessary to warrant transactions between mobile users and m-commerce providers. We then use the business model canvas to describe a generic business model pattern for privacy third party services. This pattern is then illustrated in two different variations of a privacy business model, which we call privacy broker and privacy management software. We conclude by giving examples for each business model and by suggesting further directions of investigation.

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Osterwalder, A, Pigneur, Y. (2011) Aligning Profit and Purpose Through Business Model Innovation, in Palazzo, G., Wentland, M. (eds) Responsible Management Practices for the 21st Century, Pearson International, p. 61-76.

Traditionally, companies separate their profit seeking activities and activities related to generating a positive social and environmental impact. The former usually represents the core focus of a company, while the latter is added on, generally as a not-for-profit entity under the label of corporate social responsibility. Yet, a growing number of first-time and experienced entrepreneurs and executives around the world are not satisfied with this way of operating anymore. They believe that financial profits and a substantial positive impact are not mutually exclusive and they aim to build powerful new business models that do not settle with financial profits, but have a deeper purpose — to achieve a positive economic, social and environmental impact. In other words, they set out to design and implement business models in which the profit-seeking activities amplify the positive impact, rather than coming at the expense of profits.

Numerous examples illustrate this, like, SunEdison, which is boosting the adoption of solar energy as a substitution for fossil fuels, Grameenphone, which brought telecommunications and job creation for women to rural Bangladesh, Peepoople, which aims to bring proper sanitation to 2.5 billion people lacking it, or Switcher, which brings ethical production to the textile industry.

The challenging task that these entrepreneurs and executives face is to combine two activities that are already hard enough to achieve in their own regard – to make a profit and to have a positive impact – in one and the same business model. This challenging enterprise is very new and requires the invention of business models that, very often, don’t yet exist. Hence, innovation plays a substantial role in crafting them. In order to assist entrepreneurs and executives in this difficult task we will outline a design tool, the Business Model Canvas, and a number of design techniques like visual thinking and prototyping, in the remainder of this article.

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Fritscher, B., Pigneur, Y. (2010) Supporting Business Model Modelling: A Compromise between Creativity and Constraints. in D. England et al. (Eds.): Proc. 8th International workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams, Springer, LNCS 5963, p. 28-43.

Diagrams and tools help support task modelling in engineering and process management. Unfortunately they are unfit to help in a business context on a strategic level, because of the flexibility needed for creative thinking and user friendly interactions. We propose a tool which bridges the gap between freedom of actions encouraging creativity, and constraints allowing for validation and advanced features.

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Fritscher, B., Pigneur, Y. (2010) Supporting Business Model Modelling: A Compromise between Creativity and Constraints. in D. England et al. (Eds.): Proc. 8th International workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams, Springer, LNCS 5963, p. 28-43.

Diagrams and tools help to support task modelling in engi- neering and process management. Unfortunately they are unfit to help in a business context at a strategic level, because of the flexibility needed for creative thinking and user friendly interactions. We propose a tool which bridges the gap between freedom of actions, encouraging creativity, and constraints, allowing validation and advanced features.

Bonazzi, R., Hussami, L., Pigneur, Y. (2010) Compliance management is becoming a major issue in IS design. inD’Atri, A., Saccà, D. Information systems: people, organizations, institutions, and technologies, Physica Verlag, Springer:391-398

initially presented at the 5th Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS (2008)

This article aims at improving the information systems management support to Risk and Compliance Management process, i.e. the management of all compliance imperatives that impact an organization, including both legal and strategically self-imposed imperatives. We propose a process to achieve such regulatory compliance by aligning the Governance activities with the Risk Management ones, and we suggest Compliance should be considered as a requirement for the Risk Management platform. We will propose a framework to align law and IT compliance requirements and we will use it to underline possible directions of investigation resumed in our discussion section. This work is based on an extensive review of the existing literature and on the results of a four-month internship done within the IT compliance team of a major financial institution in Switzerland, which has legal entities situated in different countries.

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Fang, G., Pigneur, Y. (2010) The configuration and performance of international innovation networks: some evidence from the Chinese software industry. Int. J. Learning and Intellectual Capital (IJLTM), Vol. 7, Issue 2, p. 167-187

Research on social networks has demonstrated that firms in a changing environment will benefit from innovation networks. However, the lack of consensus on what factors and how these factors impact the performance impedes further research in this area. In this paper, the concept of international innovation network and its performance are clarified. Then, based on reviews of the social network and knowledge management literatures, especially along with the results of previous empirical studies, we clarify the relationships between the performance of focal firm entering international innovation network and each configuration, such as network structure (range and density), network relationship (tie strength, duration, and norm distance), and network position (centrality). We conduct case studies from the Chinese software industry to test our conclusions, and then propose an integrative model. We also propose some efforts that the firm can make in order to improve its performance. At the end, the future research following this study is discussed.

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Bonazzi, R., Hussami, L., Bienz, P., Pigneur, Y. (2010) Respecting the Deal: How to Manage Co-opetitive Actors in Open Innovation. in A. D’Atri et al. (eds.), Management of the Interconnected World, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg (forthcoming)

initially presented at the 6th Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS (2009)

Platforms like E-bay allow product seekers and providers to meet and exchange goods. On the same way in open innovation an enterprise can collect ideas from outside the company. But on E-bay, the seeker can return the product if it does not correspond to the expectations, since E-bay is the third-party actor in charge of assuring that the agreement between seekers and providers will be respected. So who does provide the same service for what concerns open innovation, where specifications might not fully defined? In this paper we shall describe the business model of an organizational structure to support the elicitation and respect of agreements between actors, who have conflicting interests but that gain from cooperating together. The description of our first evaluation phase shall find place at the end.

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Ondrus, J., Pigneur, Y. (2009) C-K design theory for information systems research. Proc.4th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST’09) Poster, ACM.

Design science is slowly but surely establishing itself as a recognized paradigm for conducting research in information systems. Researchers in the IS field have tried to study different aspects of design science. So far, it seems that the design activity, or “design reasoning” has not received much attention from the IS community. In this paper, we propose to use a theory developed in engineering fields in order to solve this issue. The C-K theory, or Concept-Knowledge theory, is considered to be a good candidate to deal with the design reasoning.

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