Evan Williams on the Business Model of Twitter

A very interesting conversation with Evan Williams, co-founder Twitter, on how they are trying different revenue models. “There’s a million ways to make money with Twitter... We’ll probably try a few more... We're surprised it's doing better than expected.”

Thoughts on New Business Models for News

Some interesting thoughts on the future of news at the ReThink News summit held in Newport, Rhode Island, a summit sponsored by The School of Journalism at Michigan State University.

TED founder Richard Saul Wurman


Jim Kennedy, director of strategic planning for the Associated Press


Visual communicator David Gray, founder of Xplane


New York Times Multimedia Editor Andrew Devigal


Chris Finlay of the Business Innovation Factory


Media entrepreneur Brooks Bell


Visual communicator and designer Nigel Holmes



Related videos:

• Eric Schmidt on news, newspapers and real time content
• Tim O'Reilly on Open Publishing
• Interview with Steve Rubel on business models for newspapers and online communities
• Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News
• Nick Bilton on new technology that will enable interesting business models for news

Mike Maples on pivoting business models

In this presentation Mike Maples, a business angel with previous investments in ngmoco, Chegg, Digg and Odeo/Twitter, talks about developing and pivoting business models, at a Founder Institute event. Mike shares his experiences and provides interesting examples on ngmoco's pricing pivot, Chegg's product pivot, Odeo's company pivot into Twitter.

Mike shares Steve Blanks and several others’ view that “A start-up exists to do one and only one thing and that is to find a business model”. “Once a start-up has achieved a scalable and profitable business model, they are ready to transition from being a start-up to a real company”. Mike represents the business model concept with the following illustration, I believe was developed by Steve Blank and Ann Miura-Ko:

The arrows represent monetary flows in and out from the company. The pivoting starts from formulating hypothesis for each flow, testing assumptions to validate and improve the business model. This approach is very similar to the one presented in Getting to Plan B by John Mullins and Randy Komisar.

Tom Hulme on How to Visualize your Business Model

Tom is a Design Director at IDEO in London, where he uses the innovation and design process to develop new business opportunities. In these videos he presents a way, very similar to The Business Model Canvas, on how to visualize a business model including the elements of growth- and competitive strategy.

Related posts:
Alexander Osterwalders on the Business Model Canvas
The Evolution of the Business Model Concept

Charles Baden-Fuller on why business models are so important for business success

Professor Charles Baden-Fuller talks about the difference between value creation and value capture, robustness, sustainable competitive advantage today and tomorrow, and scalability.

In his recent article in Long Range Planning, Business Models as Models, Charles explores the question "Are Business Models useful?" where he points out that they act as various forms of model: "to provide means to describe and classify businesses; to operate as sites for scientific investigation; and to act as recipes for creative managers".

The Evolution of the Business Model Concept

Below is a second iteration representing the evolution of the business model concept, including graphical representations, significant publications and books on the subject. Thank you everyone for your input, comments and emails with additional models and publications.

Which business model concepts are you still missing? Which significant publications? Comment below or send feedback to anders@tbmdb.com

Thanks,
Anders

Version 2:

The Evolution of the Business Model Concept (version 1)

Thank you for the input to Version 1 of The Evolution of the Business Model Concept. An updated and extended version of can be found here.