Ideas, Innovation

Rethinking the Role of a Bank

Can banks transform themselves to remain relevant both in the financial economy and for the network economy? Traditionally, the role of the banks have been to be collect money from people who have money, aggregate the same and loan out the money to people who needed it. The banks were needed as there was no way that people who had money could know about other people who needed the money. Also, banks could assess the risks associated with the loans and cover the risk by way of lower, but guaranteed returns on income for people who deposited cash with the […]

Innovation

Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem, Nor is it a Recognition Problem

In a recent HBR article with the same title, David Burrus argued that Innovation is a recognition problem. He also went on to propose a solution to this problem, one that Rhode Island based Rite-Solutions is already using. The general idea is that people are given a certain fixed amount of virtual currencies (say 10000$) which they can invest in any of the idea that is proposed on their internal idea site. This could eliminate the bias of any one or a set of executives, who are usually responsible for deciding on the feasibility of any particular idea. In my […]

Marketing

Don’t Just Create Content, Create Curiosity

Nothing has had more impact on the amount of content being created than the advent and growth of social media. There has been a growing consensus that every single brand is now a media by itself. Every brand is continuing to generate content at a speed at which their consumers are not even able to consume the content. The shelf life of any content is reducing drastically and for most of the content it is just a couple of hours from the time it was created or promoted. This has led to a slew of promotion of content, across media, which […]

Strategy, transformation

To Transform your Organization, Give a Shit

One of the most difficult thing to do in a business as a CEO, is to successfully transform the business. The success rates of most of these transformation efforts show that most of these don’t succeed, which in my opinion is an understatement. Yet, a lot of CEO’s find themselves at a cross-roads, where they need to transform their organizations or see them remain a shadow of their past or in certain businesses, go out of business. There are a lot of industries that are going through such a transformational change. So, what would you do if you were a […]

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 […]