Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to go to London for two days to volunteer at a workshop run by an organisation called Strategyzer. The creations of Strategyzer have found their way into the content that is actively taught to us in the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. They have invested in creating tools that take the effort out of assessing the best practices for teams and projects. One of the main ways they achieve this is through easily understandable template tools, such as the Value Proposition Canvas or the Business Model Canvas. At this workshop, I was part of a team that helped to keep the activities flowing, but I also had a chance to listen in on the content first hand. In this post, I’ll share some takeaways I gained.
In attendance at the masterclass were consultants, business owners and innovation practitioners. Business people from across the world were eager to bring back information that could catalyse powerful value creation for their businesses. Emergently, innovative thought has spread into the meeting rooms of young businesses and corporates alike, where it has found the application of being able to solve problems which benefit less and less from traditional explanation. These problems can benefit from new methods that can more effectively illustrate the links between the business offerings and the requirements of the users that are using them.
In the current economic climate, innovative practices and products are necessary to stay competitive, however, the endeavour of innovation is not always perceived to be a good idea by businesses because there are large risks involved with having a failed project. No company wants to be the company known for creating a ‘flop’. So, when pursuing innovation, there should be effort made to refine the ideas down into ones that won’t burn money, waste precious time and become something that no one wants. Strategyzer created the value proposition canvas to help create this value in the products that we create. It is a model that pinpoints ‘pains,’ ‘gains’ and ‘relief givers’ of a given product. I had used this before in innovation, but it was interesting to see how it was applied in the masterclass to create in-depth hypotheses about an idea before execution. These hypotheses, however, must be tested which can be proven through the medium of ‘test cards’, another innovative tool created by Strategyzer.
Business models are important, so we must use methods to explain and improve them where possible. This is where the business model canvas comes in. While studying Innovation, we have encountered the business model canvas before. In brief, the BMC is a visual method used to describe, design, challenge, invent and pivot business models. When we have practised it in innovation we have just used it theoretically to expand our ideas. In the masterclass, I saw the canvas being utilized in an example-led fashion. In the workshop, he described the way that existing and prospective companies can use the canvas to transform their business. Specifically, how it is possible to optimize the back end of the business model (such as key partners and costs) to feed into the front end (such as the intended customers and relationships) and vice versa. This creates synergy within the business model, allowing for strong gain creation, new selling avenues and uncovering pressure points. In practice, this can improve the value creation of a business greatly. A powerful tool indeed.
“A good business model beats a good product, every time.”
- Workshop quote
The Strategyzer workshop offered a lot of great information, I wish I could share it all here. Instead, I will point you in the direction of the Strategyzer website (strategyzer.com) where you can find all the resources I talked about. For me, this experience illuminated a whole field of practices that I previously had underestimated. We can implement these processes in our innovation and in many different settings. Tools that create simple and shared language to discuss value creation and business design are indispensable to achieve good knowledge sharing in a team. It was also nice to meet people at the masterclass and to see what backgrounds that they had to bring to the table. Swiss high fives all around!