نوآوری مدل کسب و کار : فرصت ها و موانع

Companies commercialize new ideas and technologies through their business models. While companies may have extensive investments and processes for exploring new ideas and technologies, they often have little if any ability to innovate the business models through which these inputs will pass. This matters - the same idea or technology taken to market through two different business models will yield two different economic outcomes. So it makes good business sense for companies to develop the capability to innovate their business models. This paper explores the barriers to business model innovation, which previous academic research has identified as including conflicts with existing assets and business models, as well as cognition in understanding these barriers. Processes of experimentation and effectuation, and the successful leadership of organizational change must be brought to bear in order to overcome these barriers. Some examples of business model innovation are provided to underline its importance, in hopes of inspiring managers and academics to take these challenges on.

a mediocre technology pursued within a great business model may be more valuable that a great technology exploited via a mediocre business model Technology by itself has no single objective value. The economic value of a technology remains latent until it is commercialized in some way via a business model. The same technology commercialized in two different ways will yield two different returns. In some instances, an innovation can successfully employ a business model already familiar to the firm, while, other times, a company will have a business model that can make use of the technology via licensing. In still other cases, though, a potential new technology may have no obvious business model, and in such cases technology managers must expand their perspectives to find an appropriate business model in order to be able to capture value from that technology. [In fact, it is probably true that a mediocre technology pursued within a great business model may be more valuable that a great technology exploited via a mediocre business model.] Unless a suitable model can be found, these technologies will yield less value to the firm than they otherwise might – and if others, outside the firm, uncover a business model more suited for a given technology, they may realize far more value from it than the firm that originally discovered the technology. To begin at the beginning – what is a business model? In previous work with my colleague Richard Rosenbloom we have suggested that a business model fulfils the following functions:1 • Articulates the value proposition (i.e., the value created for users by an offering based on technology); • Identifies a market segment and specify the revenue generation mechanism (i.e., users to whom technology is useful and for what purpose); • Defines the structure of the value chain required to create and distribute the offering and complementary assets needed to support position in the chain; • Details the revenue mechanism(s) by which the firm will be paid for the offering; • Estimates the cost structure and profit potential (given value proposition and value chain structure); • Describes the position of the firm within the value network linking suppliers and customers (incl. identifying potential complementors and competitors); and • Formulates the competitive strategy by which the innovating firm will gain and hold advantage over rivals. I came to understand the importance of business models through a research program conducted with the cooperation of the Xerox Corporation, particularly their (now retired) CTO, Mark Myers. This research examined in detail the activity history surrounding more than 35 technology projects throughout Xerox's five research laboratories around the world. By design, I selected projects that were judged not worth pursuing internally within Xerox, and were either pushed outside the company, or allowed to leave if a researcher wanted to continue the project after Xerox terminated its support internally. I then followed the subsequent experience of each of these projects after their departure from Xerox. It eventually became clear that the many research projects that remained within Xerox's R&D system (and proved to be quite valuable economically) differed from those that left Xerox in one important respect: the former fitted well with Xerox's business model, while those that ‘went outside’ did not. Thus, to understand Xerox's technology innovation successes and failures, one has to grapple with Xerox's business model. In the 1980s, Xerox was known as ‘the copier company’ – it made industry leading copiers and also printers. While these products were profitable in their own right, the really big money was in the consumables (especially toner and paper) they required: and, therefore, the higher the copy or print volumes of each machine sold, the greater the returns for Xerox. So Xerox's business model searched widely (and effectively) for technologies that would enable more copies, faster. Xerox's business model motivated them to develop ever-faster machines that could handle very high copy volumes, and had maximum machine uptime and availability. This resulted in a strong cognitive bias within Xerox whose business model discouraged the development of low-speed personal copiers. As Xerox's CEO at the time observed later: ‘…our profits came from how many copies were made on those machines. If a copier was slow in generating copies, that was money plucked out of our pocket’.2 At that same time, however, Xerox was funding significant industrial research activity - most prominently developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) - in the domains of man-machine interfaces and other key building blocks of what would go on to become the personal computer industry. Some of this work, such as semiconductor diode lasers, and the technologies that assisted users in identifying the source of a copier malfunction so the user could fix the copier without calling in an outside service technician, did assist the copier and printer business. But much of the work developed at this time – which later gave rise to the point-and-click user interface as well as Ethernet, Postscript, and many other technologies - lacked any obvious way to increase the volume or quality of copies made by a Xerox copier. Xerox literally did not know what to do with these technologies ….[they were] ‘orphans’ in the company. In fact, Xerox literally did not know what to do with these technologies, which became ‘orphans’ within the company. While the research was solid, and was publicized quite effectively, the sales and marketing executives at Xerox could see no clear way to profit from them. 35 of these projects were either shown the door, or the scientists working on the projects got fed up with the internal delays, and took the project to the outside world on their own. Although my research found that most of them were ultimately not successful outside Xerox, a few subsequently became very valuable. Significantly, none of the valuable projects employed a business model similar that of the Xerox copier or printer - their journey to success involved each of them identifying very different business models. Based on this research, I would argue that a company has at least as much value to gain from developing an innovative new business model as from developing an innovative new technology. Like Xerox, however, companies have many more processes, and a much stronger shared sense of how to innovate technology, than they do about how to innovate business models. And that is the point of this article: companies need to develop the capability to innovate their business models, as well as their ideas and technologies. An example of business model innovation among Xerox spinoffs: 3Com To illustrate business model innovation, I will briefly recap the story of 3Com - one of the technology spinoffs examined in my earlier study. 3Com's business model did not emerge fully formed - in fact, it was the product of extensive experimentation. This example shows how business model innovation is not a matter of superior foresight ex ante – rather, it requires significant trial and error, and quite a bit of adaptation ex post. 3Com commercialized the Ethernet networking protocol created at PARC, which, while it proved quite valuable later for computers, offered real and immediate benefits to copiers as well, by enabling Xerox to use a single wiring harness to support a variety of equipment configurations in its copiers and printers and connect its proprietary devices and options. Xerox sought to reduce its cost, and leased the Ethernet technology in 1979 to a former PARC employee, Robert Metcalfe, who had invented it while on its staff, for a one-time payment of $1,000, Metcalfe, in turn, worked with DEC and Intel to create a standard around the Ethernet protocol. Although this approach benefited Xerox, the technology proved in time to hold a much greater opportunity for creating value: in developing and controlling an important industry standard for networking computers, printers, and file servers. This opportunity was not lost on Metcalfe. Armed with his license from Xerox, and with the Ethernet standard that was supported by DEC and Intel,3 he raised venture capital and started 3Com. He initially targeted the Unix workstation market, with the intention of utilizing his own direct sales force, using the business model of a systems company with its own distribution organization: not too dissimilar from that of Xerox itself. But that is not how matters ended up. His work on the Ethernet standard made Metcalfe known to a small but ardent group of people in the emerging Local Area Networking (LAN) market and among his activities he compiled (with his wife) a directory of LAN dealers and resellers, which sold for $125 a copy. As a result of these and other experiments, Metcalfe changed his business model. As he was establishing 3Com, the IBM PC was launched, and opened up a new market area which quickly eclipsed the originally targeted Unix market. So he went after the IBM PC market, initially intending to develop his own direct sales force, but soon shifting to distributing his products through retailers and value-added resellers – many of whom were entries in his directory of LAN dealers. Ethernet turned out to be far more valuable as an independent product and standard than as an internal wiring harness component. Ethernet turned out to be far more valuable as an independent product and standard for local area networking than as an internal Xerox component for copier wiring harnesses. Instead of designing, manufacturing, and marketing entire computer systems (as Xerox did) 3Com limited its business to designing add-in boards to provide networking capabilities to IBM compatible personal computers and shared laser printers. 3Com went public in 1984 and has continued to operate for many years as a public company. Neither the many experiments Metcalfe conducted on his business model, nor the resulting model he deployed, would likely have happened inside Xerox's business model. More recent examples of business model experimentation We also can see the importance of business model experimentation in more recent examples. One concerns the October 2007 launch of ‘In Rainbows’, Radiohead's most recent CD. For various reasons, the band's managers decided not to follow the conventional release process with its record company, EMI but, as an experiment, to release the CD on the band's website. Fans were invited to pay whatever they wished for the tracks, which also offered a collector's box set and other merchandise. The problems with the music recording industry's business model are well known: its traditional business model was failing and revenues and profits were falling rapidly. CD unit sales are down substantially from just a few years ago, while alternative formats for music distribution like iTunes have grown more important. It is in times like these - when it is clear that the ‘old’ business model is no longer working - that business model experimentation becomes so important:, but it is not at all clear what the eventual ‘new’ business model will turn out to be. Only experimentation can help identify it and create the data needed to justify it. In Radiohead's case, the experiment is widely considered to have been a success. The band's website registered over 3 million visits during the first 60 days after the release – while about 1/3 choose to pay nothing, the remaining 2/3 paid an average of £4. The net revenue to the band thus came in at around £2.67 pounds on average – far more than the band's share would have been under their normal business agreement.4 But here is where it gets interesting. ‘In Rainbows’ was then taken off the website, licensed to a publisher for sale in the US, UK and elsewhere and released through the regular commercial distribution channels. Even though it had been available for downloaded for over 60 days at low prices (even for free), the CD debuted at #1 in both the US and the UK, and sold over 1.7 million CDs through commercial channels in the subsequent 21 months - 5–6 times more than Radiohead's earlier CDs. More than 100,000 collector box sets also were sold – a new revenue source for the band. Whatever revenue Radiohead might have lost through its initial download experiment was more than compensated for by the far greater publicity the band received, which seems to have accounted for the surge in commercial sales, and no doubt also benefited ticket sales for its subsequent world tour. [Any] revenue the band lost in the download experiment was more than compensated by greater publicity and sales of the commercial [release] and tickets for its world tour. A different business model experiment is under way in the pharmaceutical industry where – as in the music recording industry – the traditional business model is in real crisis. Fewer new chemical entities are being approved for sale, the FDA regulatory requirements remain challenging and R&D spending on new drug development is at an all time high. While it is clear that the ‘blockbuster’ business model era is over, what will replace it remains highly uncertain - again, this is exactly the time for business model experimentation. Johnson and Johnson's experiment with Velcade - a drug for multiple myeloma, a form of bone cancer - involves J&J offering the drug to European health ministries with a novel proviso. If the drug is not efficacious in 90% of their patients, the ministries need not pay for it. (An alternative framing in the UK involves payment only where Velcade has proven efficacious.).

In sum, business model innovation is vitally important, and yet very difficult to achieve. The barriers to changing the business model are real, and tools such as maps are helpful, but not enough. Organizational processes must also change (and these are not mapped by those tools). Companies must adopt an effectual attitude toward business model experimentation. Some experiments will fail, but so long as failure informs new approaches and understanding within the constraints of affordable loss, this is to be expected - even encouraged. With discovery driven planning, companies can model the uncertainties, and update their financial projections as their experiments create new data. Effectuation creates actions based on the initial results of experiments, generating new data which may point towards previously latent opportunity. And organizations will need to identify internal leaders for business model change, in order to manage the results of these processes and deliver a new, better business model for the company. The discretion and judgment of middle managers must be subjected to empirical data if local objectives are to be subordinated to those of the overall organization. At the same time, the organization's culture must find ways to embrace the new model, while maintaining the effectiveness of the current business model until the new one is ready to take over completely. Only in this way can business model innovation help companies escape the ‘trap’ of their earlier business models, and renew growth and profits. business model innovation is vital, yet very difficult …. the barriers to change are real. [Model] experiments will fail, but [if] they inform new approaches and understanding, this is to be expected - even encouraged.