A system for innovating business models for breakaway growth

Abstract

Purpose

Companies recently have begun to look for ways to help make value pioneering more systematic and repeatable. This “Masterclass” paper aims to examine one of the first frameworks for making value innovation an effective, manageable practice, an approach practiced by Mark W. Johnson.

Design/methodology/approach

This “Masterclass” paper shows how Johnson's framework for mapping the “basic architecture underlying all successful businesses” can be understood in terms of four main elements of the business model.

Findings

A degree of creativity and a willingness to experiment, pilot and adjust as you go, remains part of the business model innovation process, the author found, but Johnson's four‐element framework can serve to “bring the discipline of architecture” to the process, and provide a structure on which “a manageable” and more repeatable innovation activity can be pursued.

Practical implications

The paper explains how to go about developing an innovative business model. The process starts with finding an important unfilled job‐to‐be‐done, and the key to this step is to look at the world of the customer “in a new way” from the outside in rather than through the lens of current products or approaches to segmentation. Thus, the same customer may turn out to have different unfilled jobs‐to‐be‐done in the same product/service category at different times and in different personal contexts.

Originality/value

Johnson highlights three opportunity types – the white space within, the white space beyond and the white space between, and he identifies a different strategy for pursuing each one.

Citation

Leavy, B. (2010), "A system for innovating business models for breakaway growth", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 38 No. 6, pp. 5-15. https://doi.org/10.1108/10878571011088014