In The News

A guest post by Daniel Patricio from Orange Rhino Media.

- “Successful people are rarely well rounded, they are sharp.”

Successful entrepreneurs and business leaders are inherently unbalanced. If you look at the foundations of many successful organisations you will see that their competitive edge and disruptive approach are founded in the obsessive speciality of their founders.

You can argue that Microsoft was founded on the innovative genius of Bill Gates and his prowess and passion for technology.  His passion for technological innovation became the core competency of Microsoft, the company. However for Microsoft to grow beyond the Gates family garage they needed the business and operations prowess of Steve Ballmer to compliment Bill’s passion for innovation. Closer to home, Mike Lazaridis’ engineering strength coupled with the Harvard MBA drive of Jim Balsillie has made RIM a global leader.

When looking at market leaders it is easy to point out the fire and ice balance of leadership. However when you are in a start-up, formulating your business model, building your technology or product and bringing it to market, it is challenging to maintain focus of all the cogs of the business.

The recent movement of business model innovation has brought to the forefront the tousle between technology and market opportunity. Business model innovation takes this archetypical balancing act beyond the realm of management and leadership and rather looks at how it can generate new business models.

My personal experiences in applying the Business Model Canvas (as discussed here by Jaime and Malcolm) has helped us innovate how we approach our business in the past 6 months. What I have found is that the Business Model Canvas when split into the left and right halves (Key Activities, Key Resources, Cost Structure) and (Value Proposition, Customer Segments, Customer Relationships and Channels) emulate the same dynamic of the Lazaridis or Gates vs.  the Balsillie or Ballmer within the organisation.

I have found I naturally gravitate to towards the customer centric half of the canvas and prior to working with the canvas, we viewed systems and technology as a necessary evil required to run the business.  We have found that the business model canvas opened our eyes to the inherent market opportunities in developing the systems and technology as a disruptive core competency. The past 6 months we have aggressively re-geared our business and business plan to capitalise on the opportunities and competitive advantages afforded by key resources and activities of the technology platform.

This is an exciting time for technologists and innovators; no longer does technology just serve a function. A core competency can become a new market opportunity,  technology is not a cog it but a disruptive asset.  For technologists their challenge is to gear their key resources to create new value propositions for their customers, Amazon’s S3 hosting infrastructure is a remarkable example of re-gearing a core competency into a new market opportunity.

The Business Model Canvas is the common language to bring both together at the same table and create innovative new businesses and forge new business models from radical technology.

Daniel Patricio is the founder of Orange Rhino Media, a company that helps brands engage their customers and build communities online. They specialise in social media marketing management for brands across many industry categories and are currently alpha testing their marketing ROI measurement platform Pinpoint Social. Daniel has advised multinational brands in the banking, pharmaceutical and beverage alcohol categories and is a current marketing management student at Ryerson. Find him on Twitter as @danielpatricio.