The ‘old A30’ and building on top of what went before

If we want a sustainable future we have to build things that can be built on top of

‘The old A30’ is now a nature reverse where kids ride bikes, old couples go for walks on Sundays, and the occasional adder suns itself. Before this old road was replaced by the new A30 it was one of the busiest roads in Cornwall, notorious for traffic jams and accidents. But before it was a metaled road for the modern motorcar it was a coaching route for horse-drawn coaches traveling between Bodmin and Indian Queens. And long before that it may have been used by the Roman army marching between the east and west sides of Cornwall. And even longer before that it might have a prehistoric trackway. It’s had quite a history.

What makes that history fascinating, when looking back from our point in history, is how the road was built upon over time. The same road, taking more or less the same route, serving the same purpose, for thousands of years. Until now. Now it’s no longer a road. It was replaced, not build upon as it had been generation after generation, but replaced with something completely new.

Replacing things rather than repairing and upgrading them can’t be a purely 20th/21st century idea, but it isn’t hard to see how the technological innovation, capitalism, free market and competition, consumerism, advertising, and a thousand other things of the last few hundred years have formed the psyche of the modern world that leads us to think that building new things to replace old things is better than building upon old things.

Maybe what we can build upon and what we must replace depends on the nature of the thing. Are physical things different to immaterial things? Perhaps the first communication network people ever build was signal fires on beacon hills to warn settlements in the valleys below of invading clans. Millennia later, legend has it that once there was a time where there was nowhere a person could stand in England and not hear church bells ringing out to call worshipers from the fields and villages. The churches formed a different communications network, with a different purpose and using different technology, than the signal fires. They did not build upon or replace the physical infrastructure of the signal fires, but perhaps they took similar ideas about mass communication and built upon them.

New technologies brought new communication networks. Radio and television didn’t replace or build upon the churches and bell ringing, anymore than they did so with the signal fires, but the idea of broadcasting the same message to the masses from a central location was built upon and taken to further with refined messages available all day everyday. And then came the internet and the world wide web. Building upon those mass communication ideas and upon the telecommunications infrastructure, replacing old wires with new, and enabling more people to send a receive even more refined messages, the internet can trace it’s origins back to those signal fires that stood ready to warn our ancestors of danger.

How much of what we build today is built with a future in mind that includes being built upon? Our modern business thinking conditions us to believe that being disrupted and replaced as a bad thing, unless we’re the ones doing the replacing, beating the competition by achieving the competitive advantage that comes from customer lock-in and network effects. Where collaboration is mentioned in business plans and strategic text books it is as a means of partnering with other organisations to achieve even greater competitive advantage. Never is any thought given to collaborating with future organisations, in as yet un-imagined ways by building things that can be built upon.

If we want to create a sustainable future we must consider whether to replace or to build upon, what to take from before or to create new, and when to be competitive or truly collaborative. When we build things we should have an eye on the possible future of what could be built upon our thing and make that it a reality. We can give the builders of the future more choices if we make the right decisions now.

Building an audience online, and why it works: How understanding in developing social capital from over the last hundred years underpins contemporary ideas in building a successful presence on the internet.

The first rule of internet success is ‘build an audience’. Want to be known for something, have greater influence, sell a product? Build an audience of like-minded people, those who are interested in the same things you are.

The second rule of internet success is ‘give away your knowledge freely’. Demonstrate your knowledge and expertise, share your journey, be open about your wins and losses. This builds trust with your audience.

The third rule of internet success is ‘participate and reciprocate regularly’. Be part of the online community in your area of interest, engage with people, chat to them. And do it often to maintain the relationships.

Why? Because they all develop social capital, which is “the links, shared values and understandings in society that enable individuals and groups to trust each other and so work together.” https://oecd.org/insights/37966934.pdf

There are three types of social capital, bonding – ties between individuals within the same group, bridging – ties between individuals in different groups, & linking – ties across formal levels of authority https://socialcapitalresearch.com/explanation-types-social-capital/

Bridging social capital is most interesting as it applies to building an audience on the internet. “Bridging describes social relationships of exchange, often of associations between people with shared interests or goals but contrasting social identity” http://oro.open.ac.uk/74/

“Bridging social capital functions as social lubricant and leverage, to help one ‘get ahead’; it is comprised of weak ties, is mostly inclusive and consists of thin trust in light and ever-changing networks” https://socialcapitalresearch.com/what-is-bridging-social-capital/

Create connections in common with people because as “bridging traverses social boundaries it tends to increase acceptance of different people, values, & beliefs through contact with diverse others. http://faculty.washington.edu/matsueda/courses/529/Readings/Paxton%202002.pdf

Demonstrate trustworthiness, because bridging social capital is built on “earned trust” and removing “power relations that result in inequalities”. Unpacking Social Capital in Economic Development: How Social Relations Matter

Engage regularly with your audience because “the development of social capital requires the active and willing engagement of citizens within a participative community” Measuring Social Capital in Five Communities

That’s why Social Capital works. And this is how it works… the power of network connections. Bridging social capital can only work if we have a means of creating those bridges. Fortunately, the internet is the perfect tool for building social capital in this way.

Facebook research shows that, “Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people.” https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/02/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/

Or to put it another way, as an audience grows, its potential growth grows at an exponential rate. If your audience of 44 people each brings 44 more, in six steps you’ve reached 7.26 billion people. https://youtube.com/watch?v=TcxZSmzPw8k

But just having the mechanisms to reach that many people isn’t enough, which is why developing social capital is so important for achieving whatever success you are looking for on the internet. Build an audience by sharing your value freely and regularly.

Conducting Business Experiments: Validating New Business Models – Well-designed business experiments can help validate assumptions and reduce risk associated with new business models.

Conducting Business Experiments: Validating New Business Models – Well-designed business experiments can help validate assumptions and reduce risk associated with new business models.

Research-Technology Management: Vol 61, No 2

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08956308.2018.1421381?journalCode=urtm20

Managing Decision-Making and Cannibalization for Parallel Business Models

Managing Decision-Making and Cannibalization for Parallel Business Models

This paper examines how a firm can manage the decision-making and cannibalization processes when a new and an existing business model need to be run in parallel. We present an in-depth longitudinal case study of a major bank in the US corporate bond trading market that launched a disruptive business model and ran it alongside its existing well-established and successful business model. The study shows how the firm conducting a staged decision making process that balanced procedural rationality and political expediency facilitates and helped resolve the paradoxes involved in running conflicting business models. We contribute to the decision making literature by showing how the mechanisms for balancing procedural rationality and politics facilitated the management of the decision-making and cannibalization processes and so enable existing and disruptive business models to

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0024630113000496?token=4444902948AF81A266B507E801C30B3F64C2F13391F42F4D306A88B5529C6A354AD3DCD116E14AC039BC02CF22165A78

Unlearning Troubled Business Models: From Realization to Marginalization

Unlearning Troubled Business Models: From Realization to Marginalization

To cope with technological, economic and institutional changes, organizations need to innovate their business models (BM) by both developing new BMs and reducing their reliance on troubled BMs. While the development of new BM has been discussed in the literature,little systematic studied have examined how firms deal with the challenges arising from their troubled existing business models (un-learning BM). Based on two longitudinal case studies, we propose a process model that that constitute four stages of BM unlearning:“realizing”, “revitalizing”, “parallelizing”, and “marginalizing”. We discuss how unlearning dynamics help us to understand the importance of both single- and double-loop unlearning, to consider the double-faceted nature of BM (holistic and component-based), and to recognize the complex temporal dynamics of BM unlearning. Accordingly, we articulate four traps: “cognitive trap” (during realizing),“confidence trap” (during revitalizing), “mixing trap” (during parallelizing), and “reversion trap” (during marginalizing). We comment on the practices companies might adopt in dealing with these

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0024630115000813?token=E302ACC9BE9EF89ED037BFE601E6AF1E84CCCD5D685138BCFE8372FA9F8A065BCCEC7BE8480C5D9D109F11FD248BD436

Corporate Business Model Transformation and Inter-Organizational Cognition: The Case of Nokia

Corporate Business Model Transformation and Inter-Organizational Cognition: The Case of Nokia

This article distinguishes between a firm’s corporate business model and business models of its various business units. Our aim is to provide new insights into how executives’cognitive processes can influence corporate business model transformation decisions. We focus especially on top managers’recognition of inter-organizational cognitions, that is, such cognitions about the firm and its businesses that are shared by the top managers and stakeholders of the firm in the industries and communities where it operates. We support our theoretical work with an historical case study of Nokia’s corporate business model transformation between 1990 and 1996, which proved highly successful. We find that its transformation involved using the current reputational rankings of Nokia’s businesses as selection criteria for which businesses to retain and which ones to divest–as well as the elimination of businesses which embodied business model elements which were attributed as factors in past business

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0024630111000318?token=EF480D8EAD6BC1968E1CAEEC64CBDE8C194ED766D6AD1DF7FD7AAE6D3C1481A53215A7530F74E33115EB07491085E5A2

Business Models and Technological Innovation

Business Models and Technological Innovation

Business models are fundamentally linked with technological innovation, yet the business model construct is essentially separable from technology. We define the business model as a system that solves the problem of identifying who is (or are) the customer(s), engaging with their needs, delivering satisfaction, and monetizing the value. The framework depicts the business model system as a model containing cause and effect relationships, and it provides a basis for classification. We formulate the business model relationship with technology in a two-way manner. First, business models mediate the link between technology and firm performance. Secondly, developing the right technology is a matter of a business model decision regarding openness and user engagement. We suggest research questions both for technology management and innovation, as well as strategy.

https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/5953/1/BadenFullerHaefliger13_openaccess.pdf

The Constructs of a Business Model Redefined: A Half-Century Journey

The Constructs of a Business Model Redefined: A Half-Century Journey

Despite its growing popularity, the term business model has not been uniquely defined so far. Within the management
science and practice, it has been frequently confused with other popular terms. This article aims to bring clarity into what stands behind the business model concept by providing a review of the most common themes used in defining business model elements. It also discusses the relationship between the concept of a business model, on one hand, and strategy and sustainability, on the other. A few conclusions emerge. First, although there are no generally accepted definitions for either the business model or its building blocks, academics and practitioners agree that a business model is all about value. Second, a business model is not the same as a strategy but it has an important role in strategy implementation. Third, sustainability is found to be a hot topic for business models and has been increasingly used in symbiosis with this concept. Besides being a theoretical contribution to a definition of the business model as an independent concept, the findings may be particularly helpful to managers and business practitioners seeking ways to enable their firms to deal with complex market challenges and gain competitive advantage.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244017733516

Strategic Development of Business Models: Implications of the Web 2.0 for Creating Value on the Internet

Strategic Development of Business Models: Implications of the Web 2.0 for Creating Value on the Internet

There is virtually a consensus that, to remain competitive, firms must continuously develop and adapt their business models. However, relatively little is known about how managers can go about achieving this transformation, and how, and to what extent, different types of business models should be adapted. To illustrate the differential effect of environmental changes on different business model types, this article draws from the ‘4C’ Internet business model typology to elaborate on how a recent wave of changes on the Internet e the emergent Web 2.0 phenomenon e is affecting each of its four business model types. We argue that Web 2.0 trends and characteristics are changing the rules of the ‘create and capture value’ game, and thus significantly disrupt the effectiveness of established Internet business models. Since systematic empirical knowledge about Web 2.0 factors is very limited, a comprehensive Web 2.0 framework is developed, which is illustrated with two cases
and verified through in-depth interviews with Internet business managers. Strategic recommendations on how to what extent different Web 2.0 aspects affect each business model type are developed. Executives can use the ideas and frameworks presented in the article to benchmark their firm’s efforts towards embracing the changes associated with the Web 2.0 into their business model.

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/7685.pdf