How do you enable business model innovation to thrive in your organisation?

Abstract

In this interview-based article, Professor Christian Nielsen summons two of the latest decades’ biggest management thinkers, the two inventors of the Business Model Canvas, Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, for a conversation about the current challenges for companies in doing business model innovation. According to Alex and Yves, companies face two major challenges. First, companies have inadequate governance structures for allowing innovators to do decent work, and second, the old guard knows jack shit about innovation. Unfortunately, it is precisely the old guard sitting with the management reigns at this time. Our conversation identifies three enablers to help overcome these challenges. First, the enabler is about ensuring leadership commitment and allocating management time to innovation. The second enabler is the ability to kill ideas. This is important, because every company needs to focus its innovation efforts, besides ensuring that budgets and resources are channeled in the most fruitful directions. The third enabler is building an innovation culture that coexists with an exploitation culture and where innovators can thrive. In successful companies, innovators are not pirates; they are highly esteemed contributors to corporate success. Finally, we get a sneak peek at their current work focus.