Workshops Inhalt

Workshop 1

Designing Sustainable Businesses with the Honeycomb Business Model Design Tool: Stakeholder cells

Organized by Karen Miller

Karen offers a 90 minute hands-on experience developed through an iterative process with practitioners and academics. The workshop will focus on the principal stage in Sustainable Business Model Innovation (SBMI) of understanding stakeholders within a business value network, and the value forms and exchanges.

Participants will be guided through the process using a short case-study example. Next, working in groups, participants will tackle step-by-step a live SBMI challenge using stakeholder mapping and segmentation techniques. Then using cellular templates and instructions, key stakeholders identified in the previous exercise will be co-created as personas. Subsequently each group will interrogate and plot using their personas the value exchanges across the stakeholder network. These exchanges and relationships across the business’ value network will be captured visually. The workshop will culminate with groups ideating a ‘seedling’ value proposition in response to the live challenge using the knowledge they have generated through the process.

Through the workshop participants will help to refine the process and materials, which are part of an overall Cambridge sustainable business model toolkit.

Personas for sustainability

Personas are fictitious representations, typically of end-users (customers), that are widely used in product/user interface design and marketing. Karen has refined classical persona development techniques in order to unearth a broader set of stakeholders’ specific needs in relation to value within business’ networks, with stakeholders expanded to include society and the environment (Evans et al. 2017). Innovation opportunities may be revealed by more clearly understanding stakeholders and how value flows; value may be in tangible and intangible forms, and in complex bundles.

The personas help not only in the initial business model innovation phase but also in designing experiments to test business model assumptions. Experiments provide a more rapid and cost effective method of learning what will resonate with stakeholders’ needs.

What you will gain by attending the workshop

An understanding of how to tackle a crucial stage in Sustainable Business Model Innovation using a step-by-step process including:

• Stakeholder mapping
• Stakeholder segmentation
• Persona co-creation
• Value exchange plotting
• Ideating seedling value propositions

Who will benefit from attending the workshop:

• Academic researchers and lecturers with an interest in Business Model innovation (BMI) and Sustainable Business Model Innovation (SBMI)
• Students studying Innovation, Entrepreneurship, CSR or Management
• Practitioners interested in enhancing their knowledge of BMI and/or SBMI techniques
• Consultants keen to expand their repertoire of techniques in relation to BMI and/or SBM

References

Evans, S., Vladimirova, D., Holgado, M., Van Fossen, K., Yang, M., Silva, E. A., and Barlow, C. Y. (2017) Business Model Innovation for Sustainability: Towards a Unified Perspective for Creation of Sustainable Business Models. Bus. Strat. Env., doi: 10.1002/bse.1939.

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Workshop 2

Values-Based Innovation Management - Tools and Methods to Innovate by What We Care About

Organized by Florian Lüdeke-Freund & Henning Breuer

Henning and Florian demonstrate a business model innovation process based on real cases. Using exercises, content, and templates of the Business Innovation Kit and Sustainability Innovation Pack we will model sustainability-oriented new business. These tools have been developed and are iteratively refined in numerous workshops with innovation managers, start-ups, researchers, and students. They contain exercises to clarify values, facilitate ideation and refinement of business model components, scenarios to challenge assumptions and additional content to spell out the customer journey or revenue models. They are now available in English, German, Spanish and Polish. A basic download version in English is available for free: www.uxberlin.com/starter_kit.

A values-based view on innovation

Every human and every company holds values, but these notions of the desirable remain widely untapped as sources of and drivers for innovation. We take a values-based view on innovation and its management (based on Breuer & Lüdeke-Freund, 2017). We demonstrate the potential of values to integrate diverse stakeholders into innovation processes, to direct collaborative efforts, and to generate innovations that matter. Reframing existing methods and techniques allows us to realise ideals by the means of business, and to drive innovations that cater to what we really care about.

Learn how to model values-based business:

• We take a values-based view on innovation management, and introduce a self-explanatory workshop format with gamification elements to model new business.
• In a 90-minutes session we demonstrate the card-based Business Innovation Kit at work. In small groups you will experience each step in the process.
• Participants will learn a new method for sustainability-oriented remodelling of existing businesses, and a set of exercises for various application domains.

Who may wish to attend:

• Practitioners with an interest to expand into new markets based on a reconsideration of their own values and those of their key stakeholders.
• Consultants in search for new business modelling techniques that help navigate complex issues.
• Academic researchers and lecturers will learn about a new, values-based perspective on innovation and a valuable do-it-yourself tool for their students.
• Students in the fields of innovation management, management studies, corporate social responsibility (CSR), business psychology, and entrepreneurship.

References:

Breuer, H. & Lüdeke-Freund, F. (2017). Values-Based Innovation Management. Innovating By What We Care About. Palgrave Macmillan: London.

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Workshop 3

Exploring Model for the Organization of the Circular Economy

Organized by Hans Stegeman

The circular economy (CE) is mostly studied at the firm-level leading to insights in organizational and design principles. Circular Business Models can be seen as the micro building blocks of the circular economy. Existing business cases, different typologies and policy papers deliver the scattered evidence of what in the end sums up to a circular macro economy. A conceptual understanding of CE on meso and macro levels is however also highly needed, since there is a belief that these micro practices lead to sustainable development on a higher (systems) level. Yet the empirical proof for that claim is insubstantial. There is no structured insight into what constitutes a circular economy on a meso or macro level. The question we want to address in the workshop is how circular businesses work together: how do they close value cycles? What are the effects on added values, on sustainable outcomes and on the structure of chains? There is no clear empirical evidence on these questions. However, there is a lot of scattered knowledge, especially in the head of people working on business models.

This workshop sets out to explore and develop a System Dynamics (SD) model for the CE-value cycle using a Group Model Building (GMB) approach. We consider SD to be a suitable approach to address this conceptual problem, as it helps to conceptualize a system model with closed feedback loops.

The 90 minutes of the workshop will be a crash course in participating in real-life model building. Participants are invited to actively bring in their knowledge. Participants’ contributions will be synthesized in a causal loop diagram, clarifying interrelations and feedback loops between different elements. Knowledge on business models is very helpful to make a next step in understanding the circular economy: from business models to value cycles.

The workshop forms part of a PhD project at the Nijmegen School of Management (Radboud University – The Netherlands).

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Workshop 4

Identifying Value Opportunities with the Sustainable Value Analysis Tool

Organized by Doroteya Vladimirova

The Sustainable Value Analysis Tool addresses a critical need for tools that can help companies integrate issues and opportunities related to sustainability into business model innovation. Working through the concepts of value captured and uncaptured, the tool can help companies understand both the positive (value captured) and negative (value uncaptured) aspects of their current business models and identify value creation opportunities presented by both.

Many companies think rather narrowly about value creation and where value may be found, focusing only on customer value (value in the eyes of the customers) and value created in production. The Sustainable Value Analysis Tool can change mindsets about what is regarded as value and open participants’ eyes to a wider universe of value opportunities. In this way, the tool provides a new lens through which companies can understand value and a structured approach to discovering value opportunities embedded in a sustainability-focused approach to business model innovation.

The Sustainable Value Analysis Tool was developed to help companies discover new value opportunities by identifying value that had been uncaptured by key stakeholders across the entire product life cycle. The tool has been used for sustainable business model innovation in numerous companies from various sectors. In this workshop, the organizer will demonstrate the use of the tool and lead participants through an example case study during the session. The workshop is hands-on; all participants will use the tool to identify new value opportunities and learn how to integrate sustainability into business model innovation with the tool. The Sustainable Value Analysis tool has been integrated in a broader research programme on sustainable business models run at the Centre for Industrial Sustainability, Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge.

References:

Yang, M., Vladimirova, D. and Evans, S. 2017. Creating and Capturing Value Through Sustainability, Research-Technology Management, 60:3, 30-39. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08956308.2017.1301001

Yang, M., Evans, S., Vladimirova, D. and Rana, P. 2017. Value uncaptured perspective for sustainable business model innovation, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 140, 1794-1804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.07.102