Reflection – Visualization

Challenge

As an IT and management consultant, I worked for a client in water and waste for an initially product  and services innovation mission. But while interviewing the Executive committee members and top  managers from the steering committee of the project, the consultants team understood that we had  a broader scope to address. The challenge was to imagine their future business model, to open top  managers mindsets to innovation and prototyping, and then to convey our results and ideas to the  Executive Committee. Consultants and internal top managers from different departments of the  company (innovation, engineering, waste, water, IT…) were working together in order to imagine the  water and waste business model of the future.

Selection

We chose to use a tool that would help us visualize the possible new business models for their activity.  We chose the Business Model Generation Canvas from Alex Osterwalder’s book (see below) because  it had the following advantages:

-  being easy to use and explain – especially if you are in the right innovative mindset ;

-  being a part of a whole method that involves a value proposition focus which helps people to  decipher the most important assumptions of their ideas (whether it is a key partner, a  customer segment for example) ;

-  allowing prototyping ;

-  forcing people to synthesize their ideas – it has to be expressed in a few words or a simple  drawing on a post-it that you stick onto the right boxes (e.g. Key resources, channels, etc.) ;

-  allowing storytelling when presenting the fulfilled version – you stick the post-its on the canvas  as you speak in order to share your story in an understanble way with people who would have  not participate in the building of the canvas.

The goal is to fulfill the whole canvas the best and the most you can and to obtain a coherent business  model that can be pitched.

BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS (BY ALEX OSTERWALDER)

https://www.boardofinnovation.com/blog/2010/04/22/3-tools-to-visualize-your-start-ups-business-model/ (consulted on 05/15/2017)

Application

After a first phase where we interviewed employees, made a benchmark of innovative initiatives in  water and waste companies, organized exploratory meetings with various actors of the innovation and  sector ecosystem in Europe and in San Fransisco, we had the inputs for the idea generation and  prototyping phase of the mission. Their encounters with startuppers, business angels, CTO, etc. in  Europe and during the learning expedition prepared their mindset during 2.5 months.

So, we then set up a two-days business model innovation seminar with actors from the whole  ecosystem – sometimes involved earlier in the meetings. The engagement during the seminar was  astonishing and people shared freely their ideas during alternate workshops (brainstorming and  prototyping) and plenary session (ideas pitching). Together, with the inputs of the previous phases and  with a team composed of different backgrounds, we successfully prototyped 40 business models, we  refined 11 of them and then presented 5 to the Executive Committee.

Insights

After our work on the « What is? » with the benchmark, the interviews and various intercations and  observation of the innovation and water and waste ecosystem, the whole team reached the next step  with a more innovative mindset: more open-minded, eager to listen, less judgy, with a sharing and  engaged behaviour, ready to prototype, knowing that failures would happen but that the important  was to do it fast and to learn from it. We were all ready to evolve in an uncertain environment and we  were aware of the limitless possibilities to imagine their future business models. The steering  committee members acted as champions of innovation and motivating factors in the workshops  groups during the seminar, by animating an innovation community on their intranet during and after  the mission, and then by presenting their refined business models during the dedicated Executive  Committee session.

The business model canvas allowed us to work both on the « What if? » and « What wows? » because  we brainstormed during workshops and developped concepts that we had to pitch systematically (it  could be assimilated with the napkin pitches). The value proposition focus helped surfacing the key  assumptions of the projects and the canvas itself to prototype.

Approach

Actually, I did not realize how close the use of this tool was to design thinking methods as I barely knew  the concept at this time. But I know now that it is a visualisation tool helping you through different  stages of the process. Plus, it includes not only visualization, but also prototyping and storytelling which  makes it really complete. The « What if? » and « What Wows? » phases were quite a success with this  tool and we reached our mission objectives.

Though, I now realize that presenting the results only to an Executive Committee was not enough to  get value out of our project because other stakeholders such as cutomers should have been involved  in our research phase and then in the feedback search and learning launches phases. We only based  our reflections on our experience as users and probably lacked observation (for waste value chain) and  interviewing (for water users). So the quality of the inputs might have been debatable and lots of work  still needed to be done in the « What works? » phase. We indeed suggested to use the innovation labs  they had to test some solutions, and a few big strategic decisions came out of our initiative, but the  test and learn mindset was still to be spread in the company as we finished our mission.

