aaa
What if…
…furniture buyers picked up components in flat pack form from a large warehouse and assembled the products themselves in their homes? What is common practice today was unthinkable until IKEA introduced the concept in the 1960’s.…airlines didn’t buy engines for their airplanes, but paid for every hour an engine runs? That is how Rolls-Royce transformed itself from a money-losing British manufacturer into a service firm that today is the world’s second biggest provider of large jet engines.
I was hanging with my bro recently as he tap-tap-tapped away on an amazing iPad app he’d found for evaluating real estate investments–you enter all relevant data & it produces beautiful, comprehensive projections and reports–and I thought to myself “I wonder whether there’s anything similar in the App Store for entrepreneurial types?”.
I searched around the store for keywords like business planning, and ended up stumbling upon this beautiful app called “Business Model Toolbox”.
Finding this app has revealed to me a whole world of people who are passionate about designing innovative & profitable business models.
The cornerstone of the community seems to be a book called Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers & Challengers, and the book itself is really a work of art, not only in terms of its design but also how it was written (over 400 contributors helped out).
I will be sharing some of the key things I find in the book, but if you’d like to have a nice synopsis in the mean time, I suggest you check the Authors@Google speech from one of the co-authors, Alex Osterwalder.
About the author:
“Alexander Osterwalder is an entrepreneur, speaker and business model innovator. Together with Professor Yves Pigneur he co-authored Business Model Generation, a global bestseller on the topic of business model innovation. His Business Model Canvas, a tool to visualize, challenge and (re-) invent business models is used by leading organizations around the world, like 3M, Ericsson, PwC, and many more. Alexander is a frequent keynote speaker and has held guest lectures in top universities around the world, including Stanford, Berkeley and HEC. He holds a PhD from HEC Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-for-profit organization aiming to make HIV/AIDS and Malaria history.”
