I have been studying how to identify and implement a right business model to make innovation through a design approach, especially prototyping.
Making innovation is always difficult mainly for two reasons: uncertainty and complexity. They are similar but slightly different. Uncertainty can be rephrased as unpredictability. You cannot predict what is innovation because it does not exist yet. Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen formulates five principles of disruptive innovation, one of which is “markets that don’t exist can’t be analyzed”.
Complexity can also be described as the interdependence of different parts. A part of your business influences another part of it, and vice versa. This makes it hard to build a business like a jigsaw puzzle, or through a step-by-step process. That’s why more agile and lean methodologies, as well as design thinking, have been popular for startups and interepreneurs to make things happen.
For my research, I have attended many workshops for business model development and also organised some of them by myself. In those workshops, I have witnessed that many participants struggled with facing the challenges in developing business models. Thankfully, there are various useful tools for helping you to develop business models such as Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas. However, What I recently identified is the lack of exploration for possible business models before moving to the detail of a single business model.
For instance, in many design thinking sessions, participants usually conduct a significant user research and gain excellent insights, but when they turn the findings to be a business idea, they suddenly jump into a particular type of solutions such as a mobile app without much consideration about other possible business models. Some experts recommend drawing many business models on multiple Business Model Canvas (for examples, Founder-Centric and the inventor of Business Model Canvas, Alex Osterwalder).
From my experience, however, I would say it does not happen in many sessions and workshops. Here again, there are two possible reasons. One is that people do not spend a lot of time for exploration and quickly fall in love with an idea to streamline the implementation process (which is not wrong in a traditional management sense). The other is that newly emerging tools are much simpler than writing a business plan, but even they might be too complicated for novice entrepreneurs. These points may require you to have a staying power as a business person, but your hard work for exploration will pay off as you eventually avoid to stick in a single (possibly wrong) direction.
I believe that tools like Business Model Canvas are useful for multiple purposes from exploring to representing to analysing business models, and there are many resources to guide you to be successful. If you still find it hard, we are happy to help you to explore. We are currently developing a simple and engaging card game, Stretch, for quickly explore different business models and also stretch your mindset to be more creative. This website is for the product, and we will update the latest information of the product here. Please keep visiting our website or follow us on social media!