RGM

The Build Network blog discusses in detail Rita McGrath's article in the European Financial Review entitled Finding Opportunities in Business Model Innovation.

• Posted: Tuesday, April 10, 2012

At Social Innovation blog:

Discovery driven planning is a distinct and unique paradigm of business development. It provides an alternative means of business development in an environment marred with uncertainty. Many new ventures that begin in such climates fail because the basic tenants of the business are assumed to be correct even though there is no historical precedent against which these tenants can be compared. I prefer to look at discovery driven planning as a means of giving the social entrepreneur tools when vying for market space and fiscal sustainability. In some respects I feel it is working a bit backwards.

Traditionally, one builds a business model with projections of ultimate returns based upon the model. The entrepreneur then judges the ultimate success or failure of the organization by how it fared in contrast to projections. When using discovery driven planning, the ultimate goal is to spend as little as possible while attaining the largest informational and experiential returns. The entrepreneur also begins at the end in terms of social impact and returns and works backwards through building the organization. It is a model of perpetual experimentation, trial and error, and exploration that could prove very valuable.

The techniques used in discovery driven planning facilitate ongoing information attainment and could help in the creation of an organization that is strategically placed, competitive, and purposeful with credible milestones and salient direction. This can save a social start up tremendous losses because the venture begins by thinking about its bottom line in terms of social impact and revenues.

• Posted: Tuesday, April 10, 2012

At the blog FinExtra, Rita McGrath's Forbes article Five Big Trends in Business Innovation in 2012 is cited in connection with banks and their customer service. You can read the entire blog here.

• Posted: Sunday, April 08, 2012

You can't prevent your business model from eroding. But you can build a company that's capable of managing business-model transitions. One way to do that, says Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath, is to develop the habit of thinking creatively about differentiation.

McGrath first espoused this theory in her classic Harvard Business Review article, Discovering New Points of Differentiation, which she coauthored with Ian C. MacMillan in 1997. McGrath and MacMillian noted that companies, in seeking to differentiate themselves, had become too focused on end products or services and, as a result, were missing other opportunities to interact with customers. "We believe that if companies open up their creative thinking to their customers' entire experience with a product or service--what we call the consumption chain--they can uncover opportunities to position their offerings in ways that they, and their competitors, would never have thought possible," they wrote.

That was 15 years ago. Build recently caught up with McGrath to ask what has or hasn’t changed since then. Here are a few highlights of the conversation..

• Posted: Friday, April 06, 2012

Scott Anthony has chosen 12 Masters of Innovation and presented them in alphabetical order. Rita McGrath is the only woman named, and is included with such well-known names as Thomas Alva Edison. To read about all the Masters, click here. To read about Rita McGrath, click here.

• Posted: Friday, March 30, 2012