Creativity Killed the Recession

The Business Model Generation

I have a confession. Creating a value proposition for My City Lives has been such an exercise in futility thus far, that I had conceded defeat despite knowing its importance to my startup’s strategy. Oh yes, and I have a MBA. Somewhere, a former professor of mine is shaking his head. I don’t blame him though, because until recently I was equally as troubled by this inexplicable failure on my part.

The turning point, however, was my introduction to Business Model Generation (http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com) - a book for innovators, visionaries and game changers that is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Sure that sounds like hyperbolic-fan-boy-rhetoric, but its worth noting that we have yet to recommend a book in the history of this blog. Whether that’s enough or not, download or view the sample provided on the site to see for yourself.

When doing so, you’ll immediately see the value and uniqueness of the book ’s design, collaborative thought and creativity (another reason why its a good fit to discuss here). You’re also provided an introduction to The Canvass, a sophisticated yet simple structure created by the authors to map out your business model and the determine your resulting strategy. As you can see from the image, The Canvas is simple and visual which is part intended for easy digestion and part recognition of the importance of the space where design and business meet. The overall product is more than just your average book on business model generation – this is an atypical handbook for a generation who are using business models to create change. The lack of anything remotely similar to this helps explain my own issues with developing a Value Proposition – the books and paradigms that I had studied were created before the movement for ‘profit with a purpose’ really gained steam.

I’ve seen the impact of book manifest in a number of interesting ways, one of which I was spoiled with last night at a Meetup for practitioners of the the book. Think Bible camp meets Business Models. Held at Toronto’s Center for Social Innovation (where else), a group of highly motivated business thinkers assembled to skype-meet the book’s co-author Alex Osterwalder (pictured to the left with event co-organizer Satish Kanwar from JetCooper), learn from some experts on how the Canvas could be used and most importantly, workshop in sub groups  to create new and disruptive business models using the Canvas as our facilitator. I expect there will be a stream of dialog in the next few days  (I’d say the Twitter stream was not as useful as normal because of the hands-on approach to the evening) but I wanted to touch on something that popped up when we were wrapping up at the end of the night.

A couple of groups joked that one of the challenges to the Canvas exercise was unifying all the intelligent minds in each group. As we get more educated and sophisticated in our thinking, a critical challenge for tomorrow’s companies will be how to ensure collaboration trumps competition. To be fair, I think competition can be healthy but when it comes to determining your company’s strategy and executing it, cohesion is essential. I’ve thought of this challenge often but more from a sports perspective – i.e. logically you want a team of superstars but if everyone is used to being ‘the man’, how do you keep everyone happy? Certainly, there are elements of culture and individual personality to consider here, but a large among of this cohesion will be formed when everyone feels like they’ve contributed to arriving at the decision. Again, this precisely is what makes the case for trying the collaborative Canvas approach even stronger.

What do you have to lose by not trying…well, other than your company of course.