Posts Tagged ‘business model’

Counting Down to the Business Innovation Summit

Friday, March 6th, 2015

In partnership with the Conference Board of Canada, Manara would like to invite you to attend the Business Innovation Summit 2015 on April 28-29, 2015 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. As a valued member, we are happy to extend a reduced rate of $795—that’s $500 in savings—for you to attend.

The speakers will be asking tough questions and push you to innovate like a champion! The event will feature speed networking with mentors, interactive learning sessions, and plenary sessions, all accounting for opportunity to dialogue and collaborate with the key players.

Business Innovation Summit 2015 features some of North America’s leading innovators to share their candid advice and insight. The Conference Board has secured a number of highly profiled leaders in innovation, including:

  • Allen Lau, CEO and Co-founder of Wattpad, and Craig Hunter, CEO of Bitmaker Labs to share their successes as serial entrepreneurs;
  • Dan Waldschmidt, Author of Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Achieve Outrageous Success to tell you how to innovate like a champion;
  • Ashley Good, CEO and Founder of Fail Forward will explore how to fail intelligently in practice; and
  • Sir Terry Matthews, Founder, Wesley Clover Corporation, and Chairman, March Networks will explore how Canada needs to seize today’s opportunities in the digital world to create more global success stories.

View the full agenda on the Conference Board’s website.

Register to reserve your seat at the leading innovation event in Canada. Quote your rebate code PRM10 when registering to take advantage of your special rate of $795. Please note that this rate is available for non-registered delegates only.

If you have any questions about the program or need help with registration, please contact Emily Hayward at hayward@conferenceboard.ca or 613-526-3090 ext. 393.

We hope to see you at this important event!

 

Business Innovation Summit 2015 – Special Rate for Manara friends!

Monday, January 26th, 2015

We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with The Conference Board of Canada on the Business Innovation Summit 2015: Connect, Collaborate, and Innovate Together taking place on April 28-29, 2015 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Business Innovation Summit (BIS) 2015 is the premier event to connect, network, and learn from Canada’s top innovators! (more…)

Celebrating 3 years of Strongly Sustainable Business Model Research

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

On Tuesday January 13th, 2015 the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG) held it’s first monthly meeting of 2015. This marked the beginning of the group’s fourth year and called for a brief celebratory exchange about the achievements of the group in the past three years:

The SSBMG LinkedIn group counts now almost 330 members including key researchers and practitioners of sustainable business modeling from around the world.

A new sophisticated and intriguing tool has been developed based on the remarkable work of Antony Upward, one of the group’s co-founders. This new tool, the Flourishing Business Canvas (FBC) allows business model analysis and innovation while encompassing critical elements and relationships that main stream tools such as Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas could not capture, so for example business risks from social and environmental causes that usually do not appear on the balance sheet. The FBC is being currently tested with  organizations of various type and size. It has been presented in a number of international conferences and workshops in the US and Europe.

SSBMG long-time member Bob Willard has been contributing significantly to the global effort of developing a reliable benchmark to identify the performance indicators and corresponding values that must be achieved to become a strongly sustainable enterprises. His and his colleagues hard work came finally to fruition with the publication late in 2014 of Public Draft 1.0 of the Future Fit Business Benchmark, which is available now for comment and feedback.

In the area of impact measurement and social asset valuation and tracking, SSBMG member Anshula Chowdhury, CEO of Toronto-based Social Asset Measurements Inc., brought the annual conference of Social Impact Analysts Association (SIAA) usually held in Europe to convene in Toronto for the first time. The conference titled “Talking Data: Measurement with a Message” took place November 3 and 4, 2014. It was an excellent and rich event that included City Impact Tours for delegates to visit various organizations in the City of Toronto. SSBMG was one of the select City Impact Tours destinations and welcomed about 15 delegates for an afternoon to introduce them to its work.

In the past 2 years we also started our new research stream within SSBMG exploring the decision-making processes of SME leaders and their mental models while making these decisions. Two Major Research Projects (MRP) were completed. One investigated a sample of progressive SME leaders when making business decisions involving social and/or environmental aspects. The second used a similar methodology to investigate a sample of main stream SME leaders. This research stream produced a number of insights that will contribute to the design brief of the tools and methods being developed for SME leaders. It also posed new critical questions about the position of business modeling in the strategy formulation processes of SMEs.

The past year saw a steady flow of monthly meeting presentations by members of SSBMG about their work: Natalie Robinson, Marion Real, Alexandre Joyce from Montreal, Cilia Holmes Indahl from HEC Paris, Lindsay Clinton from SustainAbility (US), Marie-Claude Lacerte from HEC Montreal, Merlina Missimer from Sweden, Randy Saad from the Harbour Front Centre, Nancy Bocken from TU Delft in the UK.

More importantly many relationships and collaborations started emerging. One example is the workshop organized by the Canvas team in February 2014, which attracted members from other locations (Montreal to Hamburg). The interaction between members and the cross pollination of ideas is an essential component of SSBMG’s value proposition. Another example is the blog started by Group member Florian Lüdeke-Freund of the University of Hamburg in Germany. In a recent post on the LinkedIn group Florian wrote: “2014 was the second year for our platform, and it was a very good year: 13 active bloggers, 130 entries in our open publication list, a total of 49 posts since the blog’s start in February 2013 and our new “Papers in Brief” series have attracted 7,900 page views in 2014, and 10,200 page views in total!”

So there is much to celebrate but also much work still to be done. In 2015 SSBMG will continue developing the major streams, paying attention to synchronization and alignment between the different streams. An important area of exploration will be how the Group measures its own progress towards achieving its objective of “accelerating the transition of SMEs to sustainability“. It will be an interesting journey again and we look forward to continuing participating and contributing.

SSBMG January 2015 Meeting

Monday, January 12th, 2015

The Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group will be holding its January meeting on Tuesday January 13th, 4:30-6:00 PM at OCAD University’s Strategic Innovation Lab. On the Agenda for this month are news and updates about members activities and achievements as well as a discussion on how to measure the progress of the Group towards achieving its mission: The acceleration of the transition of small and medium enterprises (SME) to  sustainability.

SSBMG December 2014 Meeting

Sunday, December 7th, 2014

The December meeting of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG) will be held on Tuesday December 9th, 4:30-6:00 PM at OCAD University’s sLab (205 Richmond Street West, 4th Floor, Room 7410) in Toronto. The final meeting of this year will have two presenters. First Fiona Stappmanns, a doctoral candidate at the Innsbruck Universität in Austria will be presenting her work from her Masters thesis and her plans for her dissertation. Her talk is titled “Business Model Innovation – Sustainability as a Key to Competitive Advantage”. The second presenter will Anshula Chowdhury, CEO of Social Asset Measurement, who will be updating us on the insights from the annual conference of cthe Social Impact Analysts Association, held for the first time outside Europe in Toronto this fall. As usual we expect a lively and inspiring discussion.

Sustainable Business Models – A Demand Side Perspective

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

As a convener of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG) at OCAD University’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) I am committed to developing tools and methods to help organizations become more sustainable. As such I am thrilled with the research of colleagues like Antony Upward in developing an exhaustive business model ontology and deriving new visual tools from it (a super version of the BM Canvas tool developed by Alex Osterwalder). It struck me, however, that not withstanding all the good intentions behind the development of the many tools and methods trying to achieve the same, they all can be classified as “supply side” solutions, that is beautiful and interesting solutions developed without seriously researching what the needs of the intended users are.  I set out therefore to add “demand side” research stream to the research agenda of SSBMG.

To investigate users needs we thought we would start by better understanding how important business decisions are made in organizations and at what stage of that decision process business model considerations come in. We were interested particularly in decision-making processes in situations  involving trade-offs between economic, social and environmental elements. The first steps in that direction was to investigate the mindset of leaders in organizations that are progressive in their views on balancing these elements. This research is currently underway through a Major Research Project by Ben McCammon as part of his  degree requirement at the Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) Masters program. Ben is using the design probe method to collect information on the mindset of leaders in Canadian B-Corps. I am anticipating reading about his findings before the end of this year.

The next step will be to do the same research on regular organizations and comparing the two mind sets and decision making processes to better understand how decisions pertaining to sustainability are made and what the optimal leverage points would be to influence this process. The aspiration is to use these insights to inform the design of tools and methods intended to assist organizations become more sustainable.

Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

In February of this year a the inter-disciplinary research group Strongly Sustainable Business Model was created in the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCAD University. The group aims at developing tools and methods that help small and medium size organizations make decision that lead to more sustainable organizations economically, environmentally and socially. More details on the group can be found here. The group meets monthly and the June meeting of the SSBMG is taking place on Tuesday June 12 at 4:30 pm at sLab.

The Business Model Generation

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

After months of hard labor, several writer blocks, and many inspirations co-authors Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur have completed their book Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. It was released hot off the press September 30, 2009.

bmgen_cover

The book provides an excellent overview of business models, both existing and emergent. It includes the Business Model Canvas tool, which has been put to the test already in a variety of situations with excellent results. Business Model Generation also stands out among similar business books in the care and effort invested in its design under the creative auspices of Alan Smith of The Movement.

Adding to the many interesting aspects of this book is the story of its writing. 470 practitioners from 45 countries collaborated with the co-authors on its content through a wiki-type collaborative environment called the Business Model Innovation Hub. [Full disclosure: I am one of the 470 contributors – No material interest in sales though]. The authors released chunks of their book as they were writing them and hub participants engaged in review, critique and contributions to those chunks. Even designs were put in front of the hub members. On the day of its release there were already 1000 copies pre-purchased in 55 countries!

The result is an outstanding book that is definitely worth reading. The story of the book making is worth telling on its own. We were hoping it could be told at the Fifth Business Innovation Factory conference held next week in providence, RI. Timing problems prevented securing one of the slots for story telling. We’re still hoping to be able to tell this remarkable story on the sidelines of BIF-5 and in other venues.

You can see a 72-page PDF preview of the book here. If you are interested in getting your copy, you’d be well advised to purchase it from the authors site here where the book will be available for limited time at the affordable price of $36. After that the book will be sold through Amazon with an anticipated price of $70.

Congratulations to Alex and Yves on their achievement. We are proud to have participated in this interesting and creative undertaking.