The Business Model Canvas is developed by Alexander Osterwalder. The model is based on 9 building blocks. But what is a business model? According to Osterwalder: “A business model describes the value an organization offers to various customers and portrays the capabilities and partners required for creating, marketing, and delivering this value and relationship capital with the goal of generating profitable and sustainable revenue streams.”
The canvas method is something we (recently) apply in our foundation, I believe it’s a quite insightful tool. When I searched online for some additional info, I realized how popular this method is. Take a look at the youtube video and the (slideshare)links. In the first slideshare the music industry is described as we actually discussed in class (a few sessions ago).
During the presentation two articles were discussed. The first one was ‘Customizing Customization‘ and the second article was named ‘Models for Supply Chains in E-Business‘. In this post we will discuss the examples we used to support the theory from the lecture and articles.
Customizing Customization This article describes different company strategies from aggregation to individualization. Instead of choosing one of these extremes, most companies shift towards the middle. We used two jeans companies as examples of different types of customization strategies.
This company offers you the opportunity to ‘design’ your own jeans online. There is also an option to clone jeans that you already posses. Next to jeans you can also design pants, shirts, shorts, jackets, coats and suits. Online you can choose from different types of fabrics, colors and fits. The next step is to fill in your measurements, on the website their are guidelines how to measure. The products are produced in India and shipped throughout the world. The strategy this company follows can be considered as Tailored Customization.
Sustainability has become a very common and broad term nowadays. In my opinion the focus in Holland lays too much on the environmental aspects. But what about humanity? I understand that it seems to be more beneficial to invest for example in solar panels, fuel efficient motors etc. than to invest in poverty. Off course we also need to protect our environment otherwise it would be hard for humanity to survive. Until recently it was quite normal to assume that our governments and NGO’s like Unicef and Oxfam Novib are taking care of the problem. Several cases and studies however have shown that development aid (our tax money)/donations do not reduce poverty. The lack of transparency with a number of NGO’s does not help either.
In this post I want to share two successful examples where Dutch organisations focus through co-creation on both environmental and especially human aspects of sustainability. I really believe that these are better alternatives than developement aid and donations to old-fashioned organisations. It may seem small scaled, but looking at the overall process the effect and involvement seems high.
Enviu (www.enviu.org)
This organisation, located in Rotterdam, communicate that they are innovators in sustainability. Their core business is to develop sustainable and social innovations and bringing them to the market. They work together with a large group of young entrepreneurial people, senior executives, corporate partners and universities to co-create these innovative businesses.
Below you can find a video which explains what Enviu is and does, aslo take a look at the WOW projects on the website (Dutch & English). Quite interesting…
Consumer Value Creation 