Powerful Strategic Ideas and Tools of a Handbook of Business Model Generation

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.


Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!" 

Review:
Positive:
On one level the book is very much a rehash of existing business writing, but it excels in two areas.  First, everything is put together into one cohesive framework. Too many books just list disconnected framework after framework.

If your a business owner, everything you need to know about developing or reviewing your business can be learned in the first 40 pages of this book. It pulls together all the aspects or building blocks of a business model in a very clear and concise manner utilizing what authors term a Business Model Canvas. This building blocks should be familiar to most if not all business owners: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partners and Cost Structure. The book does not regurgitate information about these building blocks that can be found in so many other sources, but does summarize the key points. The books greatest contribution for the business owner is the canvas. This graphic enables the business owner to quickly visualize just how all these building blocks interacts -- just like a pictorial of a human skeleton quickly shows the novice how the various bones interact.


Negative:
However, the book does do a nice job of aggregating the ideas behind a number of business model concepts into a single consolidated work. And therefore it will not only reinforce some familiar concepts, but provide a framework for comparing these different business models. For example, the authors review several of the newer 21st century business models - the long tail (amazon, iTunes); multi-sided platforms (Google, Facebook); Free (Skype, Gmail); and as-a-Service (Car2go, Zipcar). You will find many other books discussing each of these different business models, but not a book that compares and contrasts them.

The original appeal of the book to me was its visual layout. Business Model Generation is rich with graphics, illustrations and iconography.