Tag Archive | business model canvas

Experiences from the Global Service Jam Helsinki 2015

Mar11

10393857_741350965951185_8017900955231328757_nGlobal Service Jam is a yearly event enabling anyone interested in service design and design thinking to co-create, experiment and develop new solutions inspired by a shared theme.  This year, the Jam was arranged in 100 cities during the weekend of February 27th – March 1st all around the world.

In the Jam, the participants will go through the entire service design process in one weekend, gathering customer insight, creating new service concepts in interdisciplinary teams, building prototypes and testing the new concepts with real customers.

For me it was the first time I have ever participated in the Global Service Jam. I had high expectations and have to say that my expectations were exceeded. The Jam is an absolutely fantastic event to learn about service design, customer oriented service development, creative methods, concept development along with meeting new people and getting new friends. It is a 48 hour journey, focusing on “doing and not talking”, creating solutions based on real customer needs – and having a lot of fun!  The following video will provide a glimpse of what the Global Service is all about and revealing what the shared theme for 2015 Jam was.

During the Jam we also had inspiring presentations by Jani Turku from IMPROVement and Anton Schubert, the Head of Design at Futurice. The key message from Jani Turku was that creating new services requires you to allow yourself to play, be human, listen, say “yes, and…” instead of “no, but…”, dare to try new things and to be open-minded.

Anton Schubert talked about the importance of prototyping and how everything can actually be tested. It is just the matter of using the right tools and methods. Prototyping is about learning, failing safely and inexpensively, i.e. failing often to succeed sooner, as stated by David Kelley, the founder of IDEO.

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Master Thesis: Empowering Child Sponsorship with Service-Dominant Logic

Mar11
Child Sponsorship

Child Sponsorship is highly motivational form of regular giving. Largest child sponsorship organizations in Finland are currently Plan, World Vision and Fida. Picture taken from Fida’s project in Tanzania by Erkki Salo.

In this blog post, I Introduce my master thesis and share some of my personal experiences from the MBA studies. As part of my master thesis (which can be downloaded from here: Salo Erkki Master Thesis) I developed a Service-Dominant Logic based business model canvas application for child sponsorship organizations. With the help of the canvas, value propositions for the child sponsorship of the case organization Fida International were developed.

Turmoil in fundraising

Child sponsorship is a highly popular and high impact form of giving that affects to the lives of 90 million people. In child sponsorship, a donor, called a child sponsor, supports a child in a developing country through regular donations. With the support, a sponsored child receives improved chances in life. The case organization Fida International is one of these organizations with its 5200 child sponsors helping 10 000 children in poor countries.

Child sponsorship organizations, like any other charities, are facing the changing world as donor generations are aging without the younger generations filling in the gap. In order to adapt to the change, donor customers cannot be treated as passive receptors of marketing messages, but instead as co-creators of value. By co-designing services together with customers and with other stakeholders, doors can be opened for innovations.

New Business Model Canvas application for child sponsorship

The starting point of the thesis was that the Business Model Canvas (see my previous blog post) introduced by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) can help organizations to visualize and innovate successful business models. Despite of its strengths, it is said to represent an old paradigm of service marketing called goods-dominant logic.

The new paradigm of service marketing introduced by Professors Vargo and Lusch (2004), called the Service-Dominant Logic, challenges the Goods-Dominant Logic. In the Service-Dominant Logic, value is always co-created with customers and is solely determined by the customer.

Therefore, I decided to apply the Business Model Canvas with Service-Dominant Logic and to add also insights found from the fundraising literature and from other available business model canvas applications, such as the Lean Canvas and the Nonprofit Business Model 1.0. After the analysis, I used the original business model building blocks by Osterwalder and Pigneur, but altered the original key questions.

The developed business model canvas application was used as part of the service design process to develop value propositions of the case organization’s child sponsorship. Multiple different stakeholders were involved, and the focus was on the big picture. The chosen service-design process was the Double Diamond. As outcomes of the thesis, the case organization gained a deeper understanding of their donor customer needs and how the developed value propositions were linked to the donor customer’s public and private desired outcomes.

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Wrapping up the “New Service Development and innovative service systems” course

Dec30

During this fall, we have been introduced to various business related topics. In the “New Service Development and innovative services systems” course, we have learned the basics of blueprinting and how to create a business model canvas. Course objectives include; students can create a plan for developing a service concept and also evaluate and improve an organisation’s service development process. Each of us had prepared a blueprint and a canvas for one service and on thursday 12th of December we gathered together to present our assignments to the class and to workshop our ideas further together.

In the morning we had some extra topics in the schedule. First we got introduced to our upcoming final thesis and got a little pre-assignment for the first official thesis workshop in January. Then we had a presentation of the Service Design Global Conference 2013, Our fellow student Katrin Mathis attended the conference and presented her key findings to the rest of the class. Accompanied with comments from another attender, our fellow student Itziar Pobes, the rest of the group got good insights into the event. Katrin’s excellent blog post about the SDN conference can be found here.

The Blueprints and canvases

For our blueprint and canvas -presentations, we were divided into smaller groups. Each student presented his/her project to the group, and together each group chose one project to be developed further in the afternoon workshop. I presented my fictional plan for e-commerce and retail and my idea of the personalised e-shop customer experience was chosen for further development with a help of CoCo tool kit.

CoCo Toolkit

CoCo tool kit is created in co-operation between Laurea University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cambridge. It was a parallel project to VTTs (Technical Research Centre of Finland) ServChange project. Authors include: Krista Keränen, Bernhard Dusch and Katri Ojasalo. We got a special introduction to the topic, since one of the authors Katri Ojasalo is also our teacher on this course.

The tool kit is a collection of five tools and a workbook. And it is designed to help businesses in their challenges in co-creation activities. You can read more about the tool kit here.

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On the left: The Co-creation workbook found in the box. On the right: CoCo author, our teacher Katri Ojasalo (on the left side), presenting tools and toolkit to our group. Antti Kytö and Nanda Kumar (on the right side) are listening.

Re-inventing Retail and other presentations

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New School Techniques and the Innovation Magic Box

Oct23

Day One in School

The roll call begins Itziar, Predrag, Cagri, Mervi, Haana, Ida and of course my name Titikshya a tongue twister in the list  … The day starts with so many new names, felt like it would take ages to remember all faces and names … but know what our Design thinking lecturers had in their Magic Box new methods and techniques in introducing each of us. What comes out the box is a little walk around like “Moving in Space” “Who are we” “Bingo: collecting signatures”. The outcome was smart way of introducing new faces. Not all but at-least few new faces were recognized. This was quite an innovative way of introducing a class and collecting signatures was so interactive that reflected a child in each of us eager to collect signature and says Bingo. I will be using these technique’s in many other instances in my life, it would work out well in birthday parties, get together and social events.

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Gijs van Wulfen’s book The innovation expedition – a visual toolkit to start innovation ends with 37 techniques and tools for managers, consultants and entrepreneurs to use in projects at the start of innovation. One of those 37 techniques is OPENERS: For the effectiveness of every workshop or brainstorming session it is important that the participants feel at ease. There are techniques with helpful activities that can be implemented for a smoother “getting acquainted” phase. These are: Photo Introduction, Key chain Introduction, Your Innovation, The Sequence Game, Mix it Up and The Trash Can.

Then the Magic show continues on the with a lecture on Design Thinking by Prof. Katja Tschimmel exercise pencil which again shows over versatility in thinking how far could our imagination led us stretch our thought on How do I use a pencil ? What came out this time is…. Use pencil for plant support, save someone’s life, curl support, and create designs and so on. Here we got to know how strange ideas pop up in our mind in the last minutes. This was again one of the 37 techniques mentioned in the book by Gijs: BRAINSTORMING GAMES: Brainstorming brings to mind something playful and fun to do. Quite interesting Games like Free the Genie Cards, The KnowBrainer, Thinpak, IDEO method cards.

The class continues What’s Innovation and Introduction FORTH Innovation Method and Introducing 10 Design Thinking Tools like mindmapping, visualizing and creating and presenting mood board and brain writing. This is what came out of my mind for my daughters 3rd birthday planning, a mind map mad after the class.

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Service-dominant logic in business models – a workshop with Professor Vargo

Apr30

Written by Katri Ojasalo

The two trending phrases in academic and business conversations are “service-dominant logic” (SDL) and “business model canvas” (BMC). Is there a connection between them? Or are they just two extremes: the first one an academic theory and the latter one a business tool?

In fact, they are quite far from each other. We can see that the BMC is clearly based on goods-dominant logic. This comes up for example in the use of terms, such as customer segments, channels etc. So, does this tool guide businesses to focus on more irrelevant issues and neglect the guiding principles of SDL: customer value and value co-creation? This was the notion that brought a group of Finnish service researchers together.

Professor Vargo commenting on our working version of a SDL-based Business Model Canvas

Professor Vargo commenting on our working version of a SDL-based Business Model Canvas

In fall 2012, service researchers from various Finnish universities were gathered to discuss the future of service research and service competences. During the discussion, we realized a common interest in further developing the BMC, which we all had been using in different contexts in teaching, research, consulting, etc. We saw that the BMC needs adjustments to be in line with SDL. Applying SDL in practice and truly understanding value co-creation can offer a very important competitive advantage for any organization. The BMC seems to be missing this understanding of the relevance of SDL.

To discuss and further develop this issue, we first formed an informal group that was soon changed into a Special Interest Group of the Finnish Service Alliance (FSA – an association of more than 100 Finnish service researchers and companies interested in service research). The Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are forums for discussing and developing specific service-related themes and they are founded by the members of FSA.

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Facilitating an awesome ideation workshop

Feb16

Service Design Workshop“Service design cannot be learnt by reading, but through practice” described Marc Stickdorn, co-author of the black book “This is Service Design: Basics, Tools Cases” (2011).

Marc Stickdorn held three days intensive service design workshop for Laurea SID Master of Business Administration students. Workshop focused on how to facilitate service design ideation workshops. This blog post focuses on insights learned during 7th to 9th of February 2013.

Facilitating is…

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User-based Innovation in Services : Book Review

Nov24

User Ecosystem: Pathway to Innovation

“The effective service innovation happens if entrepreneurial innovation group with technical capabilities can unite material, service and experience to provide market accepted new service. “

The subsequent blog post peeks into the book “User-based innovation in Services” by Jon Sundbo and Marja Toivonen and takes you to insight concepts as to how and why these concepts are useful. The subsequent sections will discuss about the interesting concepts and topics from the literature.

Before we start it’s important to understand the term ‘Users’. Let’s quickly make our understanding, users or receivers of the services are generally termed as customers, clients or consumers. The customer is the One that buys goods or services and can still resale after processing. The consumer is the one that acquires goods or services for direct use or ownership rather than resale. The client is a party for which professional services are rendered.. The “Users”  is used as super set, has full blown ecosystem which is driven socially, culturally or individually. Now when we understand users’ as the driving force for service innovation and users’ various distinctions, let’s move towards various concepts.

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Competing with Business Models

Nov10

“If you are not thinking about business models, you are an irresponsible leader.”

Co-author of Business Model Generation (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) Alexander Osterwalder challenged Finnish business experts in Business Model Innovation Seminar in Helsinki 6th of November 2012.  He stated business models makes organizations thrive or die.

“We will have more industries where companies compete with different business models, but with exactly same products”, and continued: “Nowadays we compete with our business models.”

From Nintendo Wii to Nespresso , Alexander Osterwalder proved his case. “A better business model almost always outcomes a better technology.” he pointed out, and also added in the case of Nespresso: “Business models also expire”. Continue reading →