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Home - MetaIntegral. 2015 marks ten years in which I’ve been working in the trenches with organizations at a leadership level to drive some form of major change that intertwines technology, networks, and people. Back in the early days it consisted mostly of the novel and heady topics of the Web 2.0 revolution. As things matured and the ideas were adapted to the corporate world, the discussion moved on to Enterprise 2.0 and finally became the social business movement. These days it’s about the whole package: Pervasive digital transformation of everything that deeply involves our organizations’ products, services, engagement approach with employees, partners, and customers, entirely new business models, profoundly powerful new ways of managing, working, and even how to think about the purpose and methods of business itself.

It’s a very exciting time in business, almost certainly the most exciting as the proverbial curse goes. Related: Designing the New Enterprise: Issues and Strategies Additional Reading: A platform is a business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups, usually consumers and producers. In order to make these exchanges happen, platforms harness and create large, scalable networks of users and resources that can be accessed on demand. Platforms create communities and markets with network effects that allow users to interact and transact. PLATFORM BUSINESS MODEL DEFINITION: a business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups, usually consumers and producers. Like Facebook, Uber, or Alibaba, these businesses don’t directly create and control inventory via a supply chain the way linear businesses do.

Platform businesses don’t, to use a common phrase, own the means of production— instead, they create the means of connection. Successful platforms facilitate exchanges by reducing transaction costs and/or by enabling externalized innovation. What a Platform is Not. Updated Reading List : SecurityAnalysis. Real Economy Lab | Real Economy Lab. Business portal for executives created by a busy executive. Data-Driven Architecture — re:form. A few years ago, a group of UCLA anthropologists and archeologists conducted one of the most thorough studies of how people live in the United States. The study took 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and observed them as they went about their days, going beyond superficial notions of how people live and into the real nuts and bolts of daily home life. Out of this study came the book, “Life at Home in the 21st Century,” an unflinching look at the often harried state of the modern American family.

One particularly interesting part of the book tracked the families’ movements every 10 minutes over two weekday afternoons and evenings, observing how they use their homes. The above map shows what one family’s movements looked like—a map that Jeanne Arnold, who oversaw the study, said is very representative of all the families. Almost all activity is centered around the family room and kitchen. These findings highlight the frequent discord between use and design. Long commutes.

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When it comes to building a startup, entrepreneurs put a multitude of things at risk. As an entrepreneur, how can one know whether it is worth the gamble to grow their idea into a company? Though there is no guaranteed way to found a successful startup, there are various ways entrepreneurs can identify and minimize many of the risks that face their potential company. One of the first steps an entrepreneur can take is to identify the 9 basic building blocks of their business model. In answering the first 9 questions, entrepreneurs can better gauge whether their startup will be headed towards the path of success.

In our infographic below, we have simplified the 9 crucial questions entrepreneurs should answer before embarking on building a startup: For more detailed info on how to assess the biggest risks to your startup, check out our blog post, “3 Steps To Finding The Biggest Risks To Your Startup (And How To Eliminate Them)”. Everyone knows that particular feeling of dread that accompanies a lull in conversation at a party, networking event, or even a job interview. You’ve already covered the usual small talk and then, oof, you hit a dead end. What now? Even the most extroverted among us know that being a good conversationalist doesn’t always come easy—but there are some experts who have had more practice than the rest of us. Writers, journalists and others who interview sources regularly have developed tried and true techniques that help them connect deeply with people.

Not only can interviews with thought leaders in your field provide a great source of content for your blog or website, the skills honed while interviewing are useful in many types of communication. For instance, Terry Gross—known for her inviting style on the radio program Fresh Air—admits she wasn’t always so comfortable communicating. 1. If you can do so in advance, research the person or people with whom you’ll be speaking. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The intersection of design thinking, strategic consulting and customer centricity Design thinking, a set of intuitive principles bound to bring simplicity in an otherwise complex business situation, has been a topic of consultants, marketers, designers and other industry (and academic) leaders and thinkers for quite some time.

Design thinking is often perceived as a tool that leads to disruptions and success, its main premise being better understanding of customers’ wants and needs. That’s achieved by observing them in their natural surroundings, listening rather than asking (think of traditional focus groups) and testing and iterating multiple solutions. Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.Tim Brown Desing thinking Vs. or With strategic consulting?

Why do the best price metrics and price models fail? You use a price structure that does not align with your brand When building your price structure, you should evaluate whether the intended price structure aligns with the firm’s brand positioning. (See exhibit 1). For example, a company that operates with a brand positioning of sincerity should have fewer multi-dimensional prices/surcharges. Doing so may drive the perception of nickel-and-diming customers, which would contradict the projected image of Sincerity. Exhibit 1: Price structure should align with brand positioning You use a price structure without understanding your customer’s needs & expectations When building a price structure, you should consider customer preferences when choosing among the various permutations of flat & variable components. Flat components increase predictability for the customers as they can estimate spend and budget accordingly. Variable components increase value-sharing.

Price structure in action. Blame Mary Meeker. Definitely blame Google. And most of all, perhaps, blame MySpace. Whoever’s fault it was, somewhere around the mid-2000s many people got the idea there was an enormous gap between time spent and dollars spent on the Internet—and that gap needed to get filled in somehow. They likely got the idea from Meeker, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley known for her much-anticipated Internet Trends presentation each year. Given those conditions, the venture capital community couldn’t help itself. Meanwhile, look where the online ad industry finds itself today. Yet most brand advertisers continue to sit on the sidelines, not to mention premium publishers who are more than a little disappointed in this mess—a confusing, overloaded mess, in the estimation of many in the digital world. Then there is the issue of real-time bidding, which has enabled audience-based buying to take hold.

Even investors are crying foul. And it’s not getting any better. The crowdfunding model continues to evolve. Besides the four basic crowdfunding platform models described in our earlier CF 101 – Part Two article, there has recently emerged a new breed of hybrid models which deviate from these standard platform types. These include co-investment and investor-led type of models, as well as more niche platforms focused on a particular sector. Extracted from our Democratising Finance, Alternative Finance Demystified Report, today’s post will provide a brief overview of these “mixed” platforms that have branched out from the original models.

Co-Investment Models Pioneered by OurCrowd and VentureFounders, recent hybrid, co-investment models focused on early stage issuers have emerged. OurCrowd, for example, have channelled around $130Mn into 70 companies with plans to invest another $100Mn by the end of 2015. Investor-Led/Syndicate Models Niche Platforms Growth Capital Equity Platforms Private Placement Platforms Alternative Assets Platforms Online M&A Platforms. While conducting research for our “Democratising Finance” Alternative Finance Industry Report, we discovered several trends underpinning the alternative finance market. Among all these trends, one trend is clear: the growth of the global crowdfunding industry is unstoppable. Annual growth rates have exceeded each of the prior years in 2012, 2013, and 2014. To give you an indication of the sheer size of this rapidly growing sector, according to the latest Massolution Crowdfunding Industry Report, total funding volume of the crowdfunding sector in 2013 reached a whopping $6.1 trillion.

This represents a 125% annual growth over 2012. In fact, if the Alternative Finance sector does reach its forecasted $34.4 billion in funding in 2015, it will have surpassed the venture capital industry’s $30 billion of annual funding volume. So what other interesting key findings did we unearth while researching this rapidly growing market? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Like this: Like Loading... Last time I emphasized getting specific on your revenue streams – down to the customer segment, pricing model, and customer lifetime assumptions.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use these simple inputs to ballpark your business model and test whether it’s worth pursuing. If you don’t have a “big enough” problem worth solving (that’s not even plausible on paper), then why expend any effort on it. The traditional top-down approach for doing this is attaching your business model to a “large enough” customer segment. Then the logic goes that if you can capture “just 1%” of this large market, you’ll be all set. After all, 1% of a billion dollar market is still a lot of zeros… The problems with this approach are that it gives you a false sense of comfort,it doesn’t address how to get to this 1% market share with your specific product, and finally1% market share might not even be the right success criteria for you. For these reasons, I advocate a different approach. 1.

Some notes:1. 2. 3. When Mark Zuckerburg started Facebook in 2004, he wasn’t the first building a social networking platform. There were dozens of other social networking platforms before his – many with millions of dollars in funding and millions of users. Yet, he still managed to build the largest social networking platform on the planet. How did Facebook manage to win against bigger and better funded competitors who had a huge head-start over them? The answer: Facebook won on strategy – not on an original founding vision or an inherent unfair advantage.

What is Strategy? Ask a dozen people what strategy means to them and you’ll probably get a dozen different emotionally charged answers such as this one: Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. The term “strategy” first appeared in modern day management theory only in the 1960s but its roots date back to ancient eastern and western military philosophy. 1. as a plan, 2. as a pattern, 3. as a perspective, 4. as positioning, and 5. as a ploy. ATTENDING a baby-shower is not an obvious means of contributing to the vigour of American capitalism. But when thrown for one of 24 investors in Julia Jacobson’s small startup, NMRKT, which enables boutiques and small manufacturers to create appealing electronic marketplaces for their products in half an hour, it is vital. Since 2013 the company has amassed 150 clients and is now considering its fourth round of financing. Attending social events helps Ms Jacobson and her equivalent at other startups to take stock of what investors want.

This enables them to confront an enduring inefficiency of the market: aligning the interests of investors and owners. Investors’ opinions matter hugely to young firms like Ms Jacobson’s. The personal touch may be useful but it is not the main way that startups stand apart from traditional firms. Working this way is not easy. Jerry Schlichter’s day-to-day experience untangling questions of ownership is less uplifting.

Contract and expand No fund to be with. In any equity crowdfunding platform raise there are number of aspects. An investment opportunity must be captured by the platform and built to be investor ready.Prospective investors need to be gathered and aggregated.The raise is kept compliantGathered prospective investors need to be nurtured and welcomed as investors. Both issuers (fundraisers) and platform operators often believe the mantra “build it and they will come“. Meaning put the raise up on the internet and people by serendipity will find it and invest. Or worse still, the expectation that … massive mail blasts, others mailing lists and social media sharings will seduce investors not already part of the raise process or investor aggregation exercise.

This is because “Crowd” with both reward and equity crowdfunding is generally believed to be people in the world at large. Which means that the investor aggregation part of equity crowdfunding is not a lot different. Five of these steps relate to investor aggregation. This week I am participating in Crowdsourcing Week Europe 2015 in Brussels. The conference has an amazing range of speakers from both the public and private sector sharing their ideas about, and experiences from, the Crowd Economy.

My session focused on the critical role of Communities in the Crowd / Collaborative Economy, and covered: 20th century businesses aren’t adapting to 21st century realities;Why we need a fundamentally new and more expansive approach to building online communities in our evolving global economy;Emerging opportunities for businesses to create and exchange new forms of value with their communities and in the process, become more sustainable. 1. Networked Companies Thrive In a recent article from Harvard Business Review, a study between Deloitte and a team of independent researchers examined 40 years of S&P 500 data to examine how business models have evolved with emerging technologies.

Network Orchestrators. 2. 3. An approach where: 4. 5. Like this: Like Loading... 100 Personal Development Tips to Improve Your Life and Be Happier. §. The quiet financial services revolution begins | Business. Etsy's IPO Is a Direct Challenge to Wall Street's Beliefs. SaaS Metrics 2.0 - Detailed Definitions. Collaboration Business Plan Template | Info-Tech Research Group. Launch your own online school, create your online courses in minutes, and it is FREE!