Category: Innovation

Business Model, Customer Engagement, Entrepreneurship, Ideas, Innovation

New Business Model from Very Unlikely of Places #Publishing

I stumbled upon The New Enquiry by chance and was totally blown away, both by their content and their business mdoel. They are an Ad-Free online magazine & survive by the way of subscriptions (2$ per month) & donations. And they don’t have a firewall. So, for all practical purposes, they create and share content that is free for anyone to consume but still people are willing to pay subscription to receive the same content but in coherent, thematic clusters, which is more intuitive and easy to read. In an interview given to “Columbia Journalism Review“, the founders claim that they […]

Innovation, Leadership, transformation

Can CIO’s or CTO’s become Agents of Innovation or Transformation

Recently, Dan Burrus wrote a couple of blog post for HBR, where he expects that  CIO’s and CTO’s to embrace new roles within their organizations. He expects and the CIO’s should embrace the role of Chief Innovation Officer and CTO’s to embrace the role of Chief Transformation Officer. I do agree that this is an unprecedented opportunity, the current times requires organization to find ways to foster innovation, I don’t agree that every organization needs to start on a transformation journey. There are industries that are currently at the cusp of major transformations (Print media, automotive, retail). Organizations in these […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Elon Musk’s HyperLoop – Hope or Hype

At last Elan Musk unvieled his design for ultra speed travel system – HyperLoop. I think that the idea that he laid out in a 57 page document, is as good an idea as we might have currently. However, After having read through the generic description, I think that this is a good start to the pursuit of sub-sonic ground transportation. However, in its current state, this concept is impractical due to the fact that the entire concept seems to have been designed with the Los Angeles to San Fransisco route in mind, which, is mostly without much curves in the […]

Business Model, Ideas, Innovation

Future of The NewsPaper Industry

Jeff Bezos has stirred up a lot of interest in the News Paper Industry by acquiring “The Washington Post” in his individual capacity. There are a lot of expectations now from him and Washington Post to define the future of this industry. If he succeeds to turn-around the loss making paper, that could pave the way for the other players in the industry to follow suit. If he fails to turn this around, people think that it could very well signal the end of an era. As part of an experiment, I thought what would make me love my newspaper […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Lessons from a Failed (Billion Dollar) Business Model Innovation Attempt

In May this year, Better Place, an auto tech company filed for bankruptcy, burning close to a billion dollars. They had a brilliant solution to a complex problem. Their idea was to replace fossil fuels with batteries – literally. What this meant was that as you re-fuel your cars with gasoline, you could get your batteries changed at a fuel station. This was in stark contrast to all the other start-ups in this space, who have been working on increasing the range of their batteries to go longer distances or increase the speed at which one could charge the batteries […]