Ed Reform: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

Capitalism and business models go together. It's a natural conversation.

You want a better business? Get a better business model.

This blog post below inspired me.

Whose Job Is It Anyway?: "Henry Chesbrough's article in today's WSJ about the importance of business models in innovation reinforces a point we often make here: the most important, effective, and disruptive innovations are often the result of new business models, not new products or technologies. (Think Netflix to Blockbuster or iTunes to the rest of the music industry.)

Often, we look at the core reasons companies are unable to create new business models: they have entrenched infrastructures and a vested interest in maintaining them, they struggle to see the world as it could be vs as it is, they are risk averse, insular and myopic. They are fat and happy. Disruption tends to come from the upstarts and companies on the margins that need to find a new way in.

Chesbrough raises another good point: Business models are nobody's job. R&D looks at technology. General Managers try to maximize profits within their systems and structures for predictable quarter-to-quarter growth. The CFO tends to look at different factors and metrics. Marketing focuses on current brands and capabilities. The CEO generally looks at the bigger picture vs. the business unit level challenges.

In other words, for many companies, business model innovation is out of scope - no one owns the responsibility. And yet, it offers perhaps the biggest point of leverage for innovation.

Maybe it's time to appoint a CBMO. And if you're not in a position to create structural change in your organization by adding this job, why not pick up the discipline and responsibility yourself? If you're not looking at the model, you're not maximizing your innovation potential. Start there and then branch out.

"

(Via Innovation Ecosystem.)

In higher education, maybe what we need is not Web 2.0-ified classrooms, not pedagogy, or grants or think tanks. Maybe what we need is new business models.

I'm not talking corporate sponsorships.

A different value exchange. Red Hat vs. Microsoft. eMule vs. Sony Music. Education run ad-hoc like Alcoholics Anonymous, and degrees granted by peer review instead of out-dated tenure.

But the idea of "business model" is disagreeable to many academics. It's too capitalist - to them it implies greed instead of creativity. Designing a new model is certainly no one's "job" in academia.

So some who get it labor within the system, trying to distract entrenched with new. There is no position for them to talk to, so they talk to the top, or their peers, all of whom have other responsibilities maintaining the status quo.

It doesn't seem to work from the inside out. Not one of the big-5 music companies has really made use of the new distribution models - instead they've fought, and continue to fight, to hold on to the same business model they understand.
Here's to the fellow "upstarts", may some of us make it through.