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Business model design

Entrepreneurship

Business 101.1 NYU ITP: Values, Value Proposition, and The Future of Business

We recently covered competing value proposition mental models as they relate to The Business Model Canvas and Lean Startup. Business 101.1 class 4 from Jennifer van der Meer We also took a pause to uncover the core motivations, values, and inherent friction in starting a social purpose-driven company. Business 101.1 class 5 from Jennifer van der Meer And customer relationships, customer channels, and running your first test: Business 101.1 class 6 Read More

The Future of Your Job: Will You be Automated, or Augmented?

Data Intelligence, Cognitive Bias, and Emerging Tech   You don’t always realize at the moment of a new technology’s introduction that it was designed to take your job. I remember my early career working as an analyst grunt on Wall Street. To learn my job, I would compete with other analysts on a fun game called merger practice. We’d be expected to create a fully merged Profit and Loss statement Read More

Lean Validation for Social Impact + Design Entrepreneurs

There’s something social impact founders and design entrepreneurs have in common  – a shared allergy/yuck factor when asked to make business models. We try to dispel that myth – business modeling as an iterative act of emergent and divergent discovery, pattern association, and everything fun.   Business Model Validation Parsons New School from Jennifer van der Meer

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NYU ITP Business 101.1 Innovation + Entrepreneurship

NYU ITP Fall Semester This course is about understanding the levers that drive business, and learning how to turn them into your favor. You will learn through experience and work in teams to develop a concept from the generation of an idea to launch or market test.  Warning: the course involves a field work commitment of 5-6 hours per team per week. Much of the work of business model innovation Read More

Business Models and Entrepreneurial Strategy at Parsons The New School for Design

Excited to teach a revised and redesigned version of Lean at Parsons The New School for Design’s BBA program. Here’s the syllabus: BUSINESS MODELS AND ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGY Course Code: PUDM4322 CRN: 7370 | Section: A Instructor: Jen van der Meer   Fall / 2016 Monday / 9:00 AM Location: 6 East 16th Street, Room 1108 Course Description This course prepares students with a hypothesis-driven approach to company formation. Students will work in Read More

Admit it, No One Likes Failure

But there is Joy in Trying In Silicon Valley, failure is “accepted, even encouraged.” Not according to my sample size of Uber drivers. I’m in San Francisco today, where Uber drivers are the new bartenders, and represent potential bellweather for what’s really going on in the Bay Area. From a sample size of 4 Uber drivers, representing an average of 200 rides each, I learned that the primary themes discussed Read More

So You Want to Control Your Own Destiny, Do You?

Founder motivations and control for impact entrepreneurs Lean Startup  is great for finding scale opportunities, quickly, You make assumptions, discover your customer needs, run some tests, and you can quickly get feedback that you’re either on the right track, or need to start again. Yet one thing that tends to stop founders from even asking the right questions in the first place is the reason why they are starting a Read More

Finding Your Customer Pain Points: How Far Do You Go

One of the first jobs in unlocking a business model is to define a customer segment, and figure out customer “pain points.” You know you’ve struck gold when you uncover a “hair on fire” problem that is so tremendously painful the customer will work with your earliest version of the product just to douse the flames. The belief about pain points is reinforced by investors, incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship curricula Read More

Why Growth? Pitchfest Workshops at New Inc.

What’s more fun than working with a bunch of world changing tech founders who see themselves as future unicorns? Working with artist entrepreneurs at New Inc. In module 1 of a Pitchfest Workshop series, we covered why you might want to grow big, and have huge scale, as an exercise in imagining your impact. We are here:  Module 1: Why Growth Module 2: Storyline (and business model help) Module 3: Pitch Read More

The Promises and Perils of the Hollywood Style Pitch

How can organizations quickly and effectively gain support for new business ideas? Hollywood wheeler-dealers are famous for pitching new movies to studios with a formula that combines two successful old movies. Robert Altman’s 1992 comedy The Player fictionalized pitchmen who proposed such fantastic ideas as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman” and “Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate.” Technology companies are also prone to ridiculous-sounding analogies when touting their potential. A recent Read More