I was always a big fan of Conan The Barbarian – The Robert Jordan books were better than the films.
If you haven’t read them, Conan smashes things with his big axe in sprays of blood and is rewarded with success, gold, princesses, whatever.
I’ve been doing startups for twenty years now. One of the things that I see entrepreneurs do is focus on the problem and create wonderful, wonderful products services and value propositions to solve it and create customer value.
It’s beautiful and still, they fail.
Certainly, it’s better than building pointless solutions to problems that no one has, but it is still grossly inefficient.
Larger corporations are no better…
The creativity in the entrepreneurial process often remains in the design of the value proposition. 95% of the startups and models I’ve looked at over the years have that problem.
Where it should lie is in the business model. There are two reasons for this.
In most opening markets there is a vast amount of competition. Like Conan, you have to kill them if you want to be market leader. Luck, big muscles and some talent definitely help. But when you make your business model into an axe designed to dismember it’s so much easier.
Secondly, In competitive markets, everyone else has the same access to capital and talent as you do. So having clever folks working for you is a temporary advantage as everything reverts to the mean – look at how investment banks lost their brightest to tech!
This is why we focus on helping companies design weaponised business models. A weaponised business model creates market space and disrupts the attempts of competitors to follow.
What could be better? Conan the rose giver? I’d agree with that – but that’s for a very different market.
Which do you think are the best weaponised business models?
If you haven’t already been to one of our business model innovation webinars do come and join us.
Every other Tuesday (next is on 13th October)
New York 8 am;
London 12 pm;
Singapore 8 pm.
