Amir Bonakdar

Design Thinking for Revolutionizing Your Business Models

In the age of globalization and intensified competition, there is a need to develop not only new products and processes, but to rethink today’s business models. How can firms re-invent their industry to create and capture value successfully? How can firms overcome the dominant industry logic and develop successful and sustainable business models? In our previous research, we found that 90 % of all business model innovations within the last 50 years were based on 55 core patterns. The resulting Business Model Navigator is a systematic methodology comprising four phases of business model innovation: initiation, ideation, integration and implementation. The whole process makes strong use of Design Thinking elements and has been continuously improved by St.Gallen’s innovation team, Stanford University’s Center for Design Research and several business model innovators in leading corporations within the last 5 years.

Capturing value from business models: the role of formal and informal protection strategies

As an overarching concept a business model describes how a firm creates and captures value for itself, its customers, and its partners. Although research has highlighted the importance of value creation and capture of business models, it primarily focused on the value creation mechanisms and neglected aspects of value capturing: until to date, little is known about how firms attempt to protect their business models from competition, which is a critical component of value capture. Drawing on a sample of 24 cases, we explore how business models relate to IP protection mechanisms for value capture and derive a business model protection framework. Our empirical study reveals that the choice of IP protection is contingent on the applied business model. Whereas some razor and blade business models are characterised by a high degree of both formal and informal protection, firms operating franchising business models put higher emphasis on informal protection strategies. Firms running the pay-per-use business mode...

Landis+Gyr: Designing and Analyzing Business Models in Value Networks

In cooperation with the University of St. Gallen, Landis+Gyr developed a standardized approach for the design, analysis and comparison of business model ideas that follow the logic of value networks. Within value networks, value is created through the cooperation of several companies that jointly form a business model that generates added value for the end customer as well as for all participants. Focusing on the energy market as area of application for the new model, Landis+Gyr made a major effort to gather various new business model ideas considering the company’s future role in the electric power value network. For this purpose, an eight-step approach for the design and analysis of value network business models has been developed that entails the most relevant dimensions required to evaluate the attractiveness of value networks as well as the attractiveness for each participant. The model is useful as it provides a structured approach to describing new, complex business models and ecosystems. Its predictive power has yet to be validated by applying it to existing business models and benchmarking the predicted performance as well as selected roles against real-life data. Only after this has been done with a positive outcome, the model will have a chance of being endorsed by academia and the business community as a tool to support business decision-making.