Unexpected Business Models
What Business can Learn from Avatar
Over the last couple of days the Avatar movie has broken a Billion dollars in sales just 3 weeks after its release. I saw Avatar a couple of nights ago and was blown away. While I see a few people criticising aspects of the movie, it is difficult to deny the power of the totally immersive entertainment experience [...]
Business – the Decade for Making a Difference
I’ve been reflecting on something Seth Godin wrote in his New Year’s day post welcome to the frustration decade: …And, to top it off, savings are thin and resource availability isn’t what it used to be. A lot of people ate their emergency rations during the last decade. Look for this frustration to be acted [...]
One for One – TOMS Shoes
You’ve got to love TOMS Shoes‘ business model: “with every pair of shoes you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need – One for One“. Since starting in 2006, TOMS Shoes has given away more than 300,000 pairs of shoes to needy children in the United States, Argentina, [...]
Are we running our businesses the wrong way?
In a recent TED presentation author Dan Pink makes an excellent case that we are running our businesses and managing our talent the wrong way. Pink points to an abundance of evidence showing that common business approaches to reward and incent performance, such as sales commissions and employee bonuses, actually result in worse performance. The [...]
FREE
Author of The Long Tail and Editor of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson says that every economy that becomes digital eventually becomes free. The technologies that underlie the web are becoming so cheap that the cost of the provision of digital services effectively becomes free. We already use services such as Gmail and Google Search for [...]
Interface Looking after Tomorrow’s Child
We have a choice to make during our brief brief visit to this beautiful green and blue living planet – to hurt it or to help it. Ray Anderson, Founder of Interface, 2009 I watched the below presentation from Ray Anderson on www.ted.com a couple of days ago and it was an unexpected inspiration. From [...]
Start with an Unexpected Business or Product
Unexpected messages follow naturally from an unexpected business or product. It is difficult to deliver an authentic unexpected message if your business and products are undifferentiated. If you want to deliver messages that have real impact and grab attention, maybe the best place to start is thinking about how you can make your business or [...]
TerraCycle – A Business Built on Waste and Worm Poop
TerraCycle is an eco-capitalism business that makes all of its products entirely from waste. Their unexpected business model and products have generated massive media attention, creating a strong profile and following for their ground-breaking business. Their founding product was TerraCycle Plant Food. TerraCycle is paid to take waste product, which they feed to worms, and [...]
Automattic’s Open Source Business Model
The software business Automattic is best known for their WordPress blogging software, which has fast become the blogging platform of choice for most bloggers. Automattic has created this leadership position in part by using an open source business model. Their software is developed as open source, meaning it is free (no license fee) and anyone can access [...]
The Pig Ate My Plate
According to a recent Time Small Business article The Dish on Green Disposables Americans use an estimated trillion disposable plates and utensils every year, with each disposable plate’s useful life averaging just five minutes. Add to this the fact that disposable plastic plates do not decompose – they sit in landfills for hundreds of years. [...]