Worst Competition in New Business Models

A recent article about innovation at BusinessWeek notes two success factor questions regarding an innovation:  1) fit within an organization, and 2) readiness of management to support it.  One of the worst competitors in CSP innovation exists inside the same CSP organization itself, as being "not a good fit" (usually technically or by competency) or a perceived threats to traditional business models or its operations.

Humanity is truly just in the beginning decades of learning to disruptively use our incredible inventions of the Internet and distributed computing for more than just business support systems, emails, and web 1.0.   Yet, telecom innovation seems to have slowed down terribly, with exception of the world of optics and faster Internet pipes.  Since the birth of UNIX and DARPA in the 1970s and roles that AT&T and Bell Labs (now Alcatel-Lucent) had in these disruptive technologies, the leaders of today’s digital economy--most outside telecom--are operating far above Layer 7 in the OSI Network Management stack.   Maybe we need a new model north of the OSI host layer in our industry that will cover new services and business models.

A lot of CSPs are worried about declines in their traditional revenue stream.  They should be.  But many CSPs are very slowly (or not yet) moving services portfolio to Layer 7+ and the web (like GoogleVoice).  This takes facing risks with market experimentation at the expense of traditional cash cows. Those cows are dying, so not taking product development risks is a bigger risk to shareholders.

As industry professionals at many levels in our companies, we all--myself included!--have a job to do in developing new competencies and showing our executive leaders the way forward in the digital economy.  We can do this more effectively by increasing customer orientation, business proposition focus, management readiness, and architecture flexibly to make a fit for new ideas, new products, new services, and hopefully new revenues and profits.   Progress is even more important today than perfection.  It will take some contained failures to get to big success.  Collaboration can help share the investment for experimenting at a business level with solid building blocks.

Speaking of business models, I’m taking a week off to go lay in the sun, so there’ll be no blog next week, but I’ll resume in 2 weeks time.    While on vacation, I have ambitions to read a great new hard-copy book called Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.   I encourage you to get and finish it before me.