Book Review: Business Model Generation

I've been interested on business models for some time. I often try to understand what is important for companies for their success. For this interest I wanted to read Business Model Generation, highly appraised book about business models.

At first glance the book seemed bit too entertaining and easy to read for actually have valuable information. I admit being bit pessimistic to start reading it, but luckily I was wrong. Even though the design and layout of the book are far from normal business book, the actual content is 100% full of valuable information.

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur have done a wonderful job of inventing and representing a good way to evaluate and invent business models. They also nicely compare their business model generation to other ways to evaluate business models.

Book is also filled with good real life examples of usage of business model generation and also mapping real life business models to the business model canvas, as they call it.

I think this book has raised to be one of the business books everyone needs to read. It's easy and fun to read and there is lot of value in different sections of the book. Authors have decided not to go deep in any of the subjects, but that's understandable for now. I bet they'll write another book going deeper in to the world of business models in the future.

I highly recommend the book for everyone, it's time well spent. And I really mean everyone, it is valuable to all employees to understand where the value is actually coming. Also it offers good ways to raise new business ideas within companies.

It's an excellent book and it will become part of everyday bookshelf. I will definitely reopen to check things from there in near future.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Future prediction videos

I really like these future prediction films. It's nice to see how view of the future is such a different by different people. In these future prediction films only one thing is for sure, future will never look like that.

Still in each of the videos there's always some things that makes sense and could perhaps become true in the future. This video is made out of Electrolux Design lab competion. It's a mixture of home and home electronics for the future.



Many of the ideas are quite cool and even bit realistic. Nice to see if any of the ideas will actually fly in coming 20-30 years.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen

The Innovator's Dilemma has been stated to be business literature classic. Book by Clayton M. Christensen has been quoted in many books I have read and I wanted to know what it is all about.

Innovator's Dilemma as a title is bit misleading. Book is really about organizations and technology change and development. In there is the problem called Innovator's Dilemma, but for me at least it was a bit of surprise. I had thought book would tell more about innovation as individuals, but it is all about organizational abilities to adapt to innovation.

Book is thorough. It really tells the history of couple of industries and dives in to the root causes of the problems. I appreciate that it is based on facts, but I would have not needed to know those in such a detail level. It is more of a school book than a self learning book.

Nevertheless the criticism about writing style and readability, book contents are great. It really explains well why same organizations that prosper in sustaining technologies can't keep up with disruptive technologies. There's lot of excellent and interesting insights that really helps understanding organizations and businesses better.

It's a controversial book in that sense. It's a book I'm really happy I did read, but on the other had, it was quite boring to read time to time. I would love that someone would have taken this book to 2010 and written it in more interesting way.

This is a must read for anyone making business and organizational decisions in large scale. I bet they all know the book, but somehow the same things happen all the time. New small companies come in and steal the market from the old players. This book explains why.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Linchpin - are you indispensable by Seth Godin

I've followed and admired Seth Godin's thinking for some time already. I guess I'm not the only one, since he seems to be one of the most followed person on the web. What I like in him, are the surprising angles he looks at things, almost magical ability to group things together and he's way of presenting his thoughts.

The book Linchpin - Are you indispensable? tells about people who make value to their work over their job description. It's about those who have skills that are hard to describe. It's about those who are not easily replaceable by anyone else. It explains those people, what are their skills and how they behave. What's best is that it also analyses what it would take for any of us to become indispensable.

In the book Seth Godin describes these people linchpins. Also he describes those as artists, people who create something different with their behavior and skills. He gives good examples of linchpins as people who make others feel comfortable and well served or someone who truly cares about the result, not only about doing their job.

In this book Seth Godin talks about how to become a linchpin. He explains how our lizard brains prevent us doing many things, how connections are important, why gifts has a such an important role in current world and economy and lot more. It is an extensive and brilliant insight to why some people just make things happens and others just stick with what they are told to do.

Many times during the book I noticed of things I could do differently and things I should continue to do even more. Like Seth Godin says in his book, it's not going to be easy to become linchpin, but it's most probably up to you. There's something in you that makes you special, you just need to really learn to use your skills.

I've always admired Seth Godin for his ability to say things in compact, even short, form. His blog posts and some of the previous books I've read are carefully shortened to give a clear and simple message. This time it's different. Book is not that compact and I could even say that it's not organized in such a smart way as he normally does. I got the feeling that the subject in question might have been such an important for him, that he might have not been able to really analyze his own doings so well, than with less important subjects. That's at least what I've noticed, what closer the subject is to your heart, that harder it is to subjectively analyze it.

It's a brilliant book, but it's not easy to read. Or the text is easy to read, but some of the ideas are such new and bold, that it takes some chewing to really understand meaning of all of those. To read it, it's for everyone, but I believe most of the people don't really take all of it seriously. I liked it and I hope I have the guts to take in to use the things I figured out during this book. 

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Ideas are seeds, execution are the plants

Ideas are almost worthless. Good ideas might be worth something, but without taking proper actions from ideas, they are not worth anything. Ideas are like seeds, they don't cost much and those are quite easy to find from anywhere. Seeds don't start to grow without planting those to the right grounds and starting to take care of those. That's the same with ideas, if you just keep those in your drawer, nothings going to happen to those ideas.

Once in a while someone comes to me and says, I have a great business idea. What if we would do this and that, wouldn't it be amazing. I admit that I've done the same. I have a pile of business ideas in my virtual drawer (in Google Docs) where I type out those ideas for storage when those come to my mind. For a long time, I thought those are important and kind of like a treasure for me. Just recently I've figured out that those are not worth anything. Really, those are not worth anything. Those are just ideas, which might lead to somewhere with good execution, but ideas as such don't have any value to anyone. It's the same with this post. This post as an idea in my mind, didn't have any value to anyone. I discussed about this subject with my colleagues few days back and then there came some value to the ideas and now this actually materializes to it's current value with my execution to this blog. 

A week ago I read an excellent post from Derek Sivers about value of ideas (here's the post). The idea in his post is that execution is tens of thousands or million time's more valuable than just the idea. That's what I'm trying to say in this post also, ideas are really not worth much or if anything without execution. Execution is the thing that makes ideas fly, not the ideas itself.

Reason I and many else have been careful about sharing ideas that we've thought that they do have a value and that someone might steal those ideas. Sure someone might steal your idea if you share with others, but most often you need to really have marvelous idea for anyone to even listen your ideas. And like I've said many times, execution and the vision is the thing that matters, not the idea itself. If you are sure about your idea being really good, don't worry about someone stealing it, go ahead and execute better than others. There's always going to be competition, maybe it's better to face it early.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever protect your ideas. In some cases it might be wise to keep your ideas with small group or only share parts of your idea to others. The main point still is, that you should think when the ideas really start to get value. Is partly done done, or not done at all. Some could argue that there isn't any value created on any doing before it's really out there with real users.

For organizations this might be different. Some bigger companies do get extra value of not publishing ideas before execution, in order to get more publicity from the launch of a product or a service. For smaller companies it might be quite the opposite, they could actually gain publicity or funding for their product or a service for opening up ideas really early to public. They can get fast feedback and tips for the execution for opening up the ideas sooner than later. And at the end, what will make a difference is the execution.

If you have a brilliant idea, maybe the best thing you could do would be to spread the idea to everyone willing to listen as much as you can. Best thing that could happen to you might be, that someone else things that the idea is great. And that might even lead to the next step of execution of the idea. With keeping the idea to yourself, most probably the idea will just die itself to old age.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Innovation is all about execution

Innovation is often misthought to be all about ideas. Often people think that great ideas means great innovations. Actually ideas as such don't have much value. Ideas are easy to come up with, but what makes a difference is the execution.

One consequence of this false thinking of ideas being the important thing on creating innovative products, are all the systematic innovation methods and processes that are seen with companies and other organisations. From the book Inside Steve's brain I loved Steve Jobs citate:"trying to systemize innovation, is like somebody not cool, trying to be cool". That's exactly what I've felt on these innovation boosting systems what I've seen in many different places. They are focused on gathering new ideas. Often those even give the greatest value to ideas which are most original and are most weird and out of the current world. Revolution is quite rare, evolution is happening all the time.

Best projects where I've take part have had a real focus on details. Those have had a vision of an idea and then we've all been together working hard to get all the smallest details right. That have required lot of iterations and lot of errors. Making a mistake is a key thing on creating great innovative products. If you never make a mistake when creating something new and innovative, then you've just never realised the importance of learning and mistakes on you creation process.

I learned from the same book Inside Steve's brain another great quote, this one is from Pablo Picasso: "Good artist copy, great artist steal". This tells exactly what innovation is mainly about. If you think companies like Apple, they haven't really ever invented anything totally new. They've just taken good ideas from others and owned those and made those perfect. Same is true almost about any products or companies that are thought to be innovative. If you think Facebook, there's been social networks before them, they just executed theirs perfectly. Same is true about Toyota Prius. This innovative hybrid car was not the first or only car on the market that time, Toyota just executed perfectly and kept improving their early prototypes. Innovation is often about stealing, undesrtanding a great idea and improving it to be perfect when creating the product.

When you are working on innovative products, concentrate on details and vision of a problem you are solving. Overall all innovative products are solving real user problems. Some of these problems are just problems that will come obvious in the future and people don't really understand having those yet. If you think of mobile phones as an example, people didn't know twenty years ago, that they would need to be able to communicate with others everywhere. With mobile phones, the problem has always been there, people just didn't think that it could be solved.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Inside Steve's brain - expanded edition

I read book about Steve Jobs and Apple written by Leander Kahney. Book's name was Inside Steve's brain. Copy I had was an extended edition of this book. I figured out from the name, that the book would really dig into mindset of Steve Jobs. I knew that writer Leander Kahney didn't have the permission from Steve Jobs for this book, but still I assumed he had second hand material which would open up the mind of one interesting technology leader.

I have to start with the negative side of the book. It promises in the name that it would be "inside Steve's brain" and would really tell why Steve Jobs behaves as he does, what are his motives and driving forces. Unfortunately this is not what the book really is about. Book really is an entertaining and excellent one, but it doesn't really fulfill it's promise from the name. I expected it to be different than it was, but when I got over the disappointment, I realised there's lot of good in this book.

If you admire Apple products, like most of us do, this is the book that tells more about how Apple creates it's products. It tells about excellent people and their processes to create these innovative and cool looking products of theirs. It could almost work as a bible for those who believe that Apple's way of building products is the best and only way. It really gives lot of food for thought about importance of design, product thinking, innovation and clear focus, when creating products.

I specially loved the parts where it told how innovations and designs are created at Apple. Innovation and beautiful designs don't just come from great thinkers, but they need hard work and lots of iterations even from some of the best guys in the planet.

For guys creating any types of products, you should be aware how Apple has done theirs. Understanding that methodology will give you good ideas how to improve your own organisation on improving the ways you create products. That's the reasoning I would sell this book to you if not an Apple fanboy. If you are, then I guess I don't need to sell it to you.

I have to admit I was hoping the book to be more about Steve Jobs. This book was mainly about Apple, which for some might equal to Steve Jobs, but not for me. I've found Mr. Jobs personality and experience such an interesting, that I hope to find more about that on the soon to come book Steve Jobs.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

This type of marketing and innovation I admire - Reaction ball

I run into reaction ball by accident, when checking some other sports equipment. The idea is marvelous. Someone invented a ball, which is not round and can bounce in any direction. This kind of stuff can be easily made by accident.

In this case, someone realized that this could have business value. There's lot of athletes who train to be fast to react and this ball if any needs fast reaction skills to catch.

Here's a video from CorePerformance about training with reaction ball. It looks just like the one's from TV shop, but I believe this really works.

Even the idea feels really simple, even a silly one, this excellent example of how innovations don't need to be that complex. I've played a long time different sport requiring fast reactions and this would have definitely been a good addition to reaction trainings. This one of those things that everyone can say that: "I could have invented that one." The thing there is that, you didn't. It required someone with vision to productise this worthless piece of rubber to actual product.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Innovative idea from airline: Get gift card insurance for delayed flights

I was checking out vacation possibilities for trip this fall and run into AirBaltic airline, which flies mainly around baltic and nordic countries. It's one of these low fare airlines. They had interesting concept to share with you: you could buy "an insurance" for getting a gift card for flights which are delayed over one hour.

That's a great idea for airline flying these short routes. I would think this airline is used a lot for short trips to nearby countries. In those type of trips, delayes flight will eat up important time from vacation. If'you are only travelling for weekend, being delayed couple of hours on Friday, will easily ruin your day and leave only Saturday for vacation. Now with this delay you would get gift card for new trip in future to get back that stolen time.

This type of innovative services from these low fare airlines I appreciate. Many of these type of airlines have went to the other road of billing about everything. That's just annoying. This is good lesson for them to learn that they could be innovative and sell services that add value, not just piss off people.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Super cool augmented reality cinema - not really augmented though

There's a super cool augmented reality cinema app video going viral, definitely worth of checking out. Here's their web pages also: augmentedrealitycinema.com



I'm going to be nitpicker. I don't see how in earth it could really work as augmented reality app? Films are shoot in one or couple different angles, but in order it to really be an augmented reality it would need to be available in all angles and actually shown on top of the view you are looking. Quite challenging, I must say.

From the video you can see, that app is mainly playing back the scenes from the actual movies, so not really augmenting those in the view you are watching. So it's not really augmented reality app, but more of virtual reality based on location.

That's said, the app looks really great and idea is marvelous. It's a perfect addition to movie and series location tourism. I'm eagerly waiting to see it really in action.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Take pictures you can focus later

I run into to this new camera type from Lytro, which will take pictures so that you don't need to focus. You can actually leave the focusing to the one's who are looking the picture later. Here's promotional video about their solution:



Here's some picture's from their demo gallery, so you can see and try it yourself. So tick different places in image to focus on that level:


By Lytro / Richard Koci Hernandez
Sophie Hernandez, 13, lost in her favorite book.


By Lytro / Jason Bradley
Shore entry in Monterey Bay, California


By Lytro / Eric Cheng
The colorful crowds of Hollywood, CA.

I don't want to judge too much in this phase of what purpose this could be used, but definitely there will be use for this kind of camera. I would guess it will cost a lot for starters, but as all technology it will come cheaper over time.

It will make one aspect of photography totally different. You can't play with focus as you have used to, but you must use focus much more creatively, since users can focus your pictures later on.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Online grocery store in subway stations - great idea by Tesco

My favorite idea sharing site Springwise just blogged about Tesco's South-Korea online Grocery market experiment.

This stuff is just genius. People can shop when they wait for subway in a look alike grocery store and then food get's delivered to their home. Check the video out, it's really groundbreakingly cool:



I have long history with grocery store business, since both my parents have been in the industry my whole life, so it's close to my heart. I always keep on wondering the delivery chain for these online grocery markets. To keep the cold chain, you would need to make sure that deliveries are not standing anywhere without fridge. This is one really challenging task and unfortunately they don't tell in the video how they tackled that one. Maybe the problem is bit "western", since we tend to be so strict with these regulations at least in Nordic countries.

I just love the idea and especially execution of store shelf lookalikes.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

My love and hate for telesellers

I don't honestly like when they try to sell me something via phone. It's really annoying. Still I have to tell you about two calls I've got. They just come up with such a inviting offers, that I just admire the creativity.

Recently I got a call from salesgirl. She quickly introduced herself and said that they have decided to give me travel magazine for free for whole year! Wow that's an offer that sounded bit too good to be true for me. She right away asked how I felt about the magazine and offer. I didn't say much until she continues that I only would need to pay production and delivery costs of the magazine, 3,95€ per month. So I guess I would have got the "innovation and work" for the content free, I would have only need to pay for everything else. What an anticlimax, I hang up.

Second similar call I got some time ago. My cable TV operator called me and said that they had chosen me for private trial for 50 persons. I was selected to get to check out some renewed channel set and give feedback about that one. I would get it for two months for free, if I only would sign the contract for next 6 months for full price. That was just ridiculous. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate the 25 percent discount offer from there, and nothing was really was free. The focus group talks most probably was just plain bullshit.

Afterwards those calls have been hilarious. How on earth they came up with those and most importantly does someone really buy after that massive bullshitting. It might be the worst selling strategy ever, over promise in the first two sentences and get caught after a minute.

I'll be waiting what ridiculous offer they come up next time.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Inspiring ways to connect social media with real life

In a motorshow in Amsterdam Renault had Facebook passes (cards with RFID) that you could register your Facebook accounts to and use those tho "like" their cars in that show. That was a really cool new way to get people to share their experience in that show and also get free publicity via social network. Here's the whole story as reported in Springwise.

Couple months ago I blogged about Shoes as your social media tools, which was a school project where they used shoes to be able to check-in to places using special carpet. That was another way to connect social media with real life.

I've seen couple of similar ideas in couple of other occasions and I believe there's a trend there. Real world and social media is getting more and more connected. Foursquare, FB places and other location based services have taken the first step, but I wouldn't be surprised if we would soon jump out of app world to integrated world of things. I bet some of the clothes makers are already planning to integrate social media chips to their clothes or something similar.

I can already imagine people tagging to like something with their jacket sleeves, wrist bands or rings. This trend could start with similar liking as it is now, but soon there could be also "hanging with out with these guys" type of check-ins or likes. There you would be checking in also with people, not only with places or products.

It would be easy to say that phones will play an important role on these type activities, since those are still most often carried with, but I still believe these type of activities could work even without a display. You could sign in to your equipment (cloth, jewelry, key chain or whatever) and then just touching something with that one does the one action it is meant to do. Dead simple and cool.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

First boat to go around the globe with only solar power

There has been for a half a year already expedition ongoing to go around the world with boat using only solar power. They have already got half way around the world and are currently heading from Central-America to Australia.

Using solar power for boats makes lot of sense and definitely will be the way to go in future. Sea and sun goes well together and specifically for leisure purposes these kind of boats seem great. Hopefully also soon in the future there would be enough capacity to carry cargo with those. If you are interested go to see the details from their website and see the route and lot more info with videos and maps about journey. 

PlanetSolar

Here's the boat details from their website:

Technology

PlanetSolar is a catamaran that runs solely on the energy found in light. Additional removable parts allow it to expose a total of 537 m2 of photovoltaic modules (solar panels) to the sun. This impressive data makes it the biggest solar-powered ship in the world. 

• Legnth: 31 m
• Width: 15 m
• Length with flaps: 35 m
• Width with flaps: 23 m
• Height: 6.1 m
• Draft: 1.55 m
• Weight: 95 t
• Surface area of solar modules: 537 m²
• PV panel efficiency: 18.8%
• Installed PV power: 93.5 kW (127.0 hp)
• Average engine consumption: 20 kW (26.8 hp)
• Crew: 6 people
• Number of people that can go on board: 40
• Autonomy: never-ending solar navigation

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Safe the world with robots

Cool way to use robots for good cause. Finnish company having a robot for picking recyclable items from waste.

They have one of the coolest product videos I've seen a while. You could easily make really boring video out of robot picking stuff from waste, but these guys made it really cool.



Company: Zenrobotics
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

My thoughts about book Gamestorming

I've always enjoyed events and meetings which have something special. It's always nice when organizers have used time to think about better ways to spend the time together than just regular meetings or normal events. That's the reason I bought this book, Gamestorming. I was expecting to get good ideas for organizing meetings or events. Book really hit the target.

Book made by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo is a perfect playbook for anyone wanting to make more productive meetings. It tells a bit overall about gamestorming, using game type of activities for different situations to resolve problems, and also it gives lot of good games to try with. I was familiar with few of the gamestorming games beforehand and I can say from experience that those have been really productive meetings and events when those were used.

This book will definitely have a place in my office bookshelf as playbook for different situations. I'm eagerly waiting to get to try some of these games out. I know that it does require a certain type of issues and a group willing enough to use these, but situations to use these still come quite often. For that reason I'm going to keep this book close.

Book was easy to read and games were easy to understand. Still already now, I know that I don't remember half of the games there were. I used a different tactics, I tried to detect situations, where I think these games would come handy. Then next time when I come to similar situation, I will pick up the book and check one of the games I thought would suit that situation. So my idea is to start to use it as a guide for these games and I'll learn by trying these out.

If you need to organize events, solve problems with groups or get people for meetings, this book is a really good one.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Mind controls, controlling car with brain

Possibilities to undestand brains and use those for controls seems to go fast forward. Here's an example of controlling car with brain sensors. Quite impressive.



I could already see numerous ways to use these brain controls. The first usage most probably isn't to use it for driving a car, but there's lot of things where having brains as extra pair of controls would offer much better possibilities to control machines.

You can check more on their website http://autonomos.inf.fu-berlin.de/  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Shoes as your social media tools

UPDATE 5.2.2011: Now the video is visible again. It's updated a bit, but it have all the great content still there. Now it says clearly that it's a school project and not done by ad agency. Apologies for that. 

UPDATE 31.1.2011: These guys have decided to make this video locked with password. That's just lame! Why in earth to put it to Vimeo in the first place if people can't share it. So sorry for video not being available anymore. I want to keep the post here still if you want to read it.

I find this idea really interesting. You would have RFID in your shoe and you could easily check in places and connect to any social services using specific spots (or mats as in this one). Check the video out:


RFID in shoes from Hampus Lemhag on Vimeo.
As I understand this isn't really real yet, but it's a concept done by ad agency a school project in Hyper Island.

There's definitely something in the idea. My guess is that this connecting yourself to online world with touching things will become more and more popular in near future. There are many good options what is the "device" you will connect with, it could be phone, it could be some jewel or it could be shoe. It just needs to be dead simple.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

My thought about book Innovation X

I read this one some months ago already, but for some reason I never actually released this post about Innovation X (why companies toughest problems are its greatest advantage) . It's a book from Adam Richardson from Frog Design.

Book Innovation X is mainly about understanding your business much better. It helps you to understand that in the world we live in, there is competition coming from everywhere. Local stores don't only compete with other locals, but anyone in the web selling the same stuff. And for example movie theaters don't compete only with TV and web showing movies, but they actually compete with other media consumption ways, about the time and space used for any entertainment. Understanding that there is competition coming from everywhere can actually be your greatest advantage, as the book will explain.

Book is full of good thoughts and valuable information, especially via it's examples. Those are fun to read and really add value to the book and reader. Actually I found examples being the best part of the book. In some cases text turned out to be bit longish and could have been written in a more colorful way. Actual content, the idea, on the other hand was inspiring and widened my thinking on competition.

It's not "fun and easy" to read as many business books nowadays, but it's full of good stuff about how competition field for all products have enlarged a lot. It gives good tips on how to be acknowledged about competition and your own product. I think it's definitely worth of reading and I recommend it if you have anything to do with product or service creation of any kind.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen