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CHALLENGE
Our client, an experienced company from the design and furniture industry sets itself the vision, titled "Circular Economy". The problem: Some consumer segments contradict themselves: They articulate the desire for "sustainability" yet consume under the premise of "convenience".
Our client is looking for a value proposition and a business model that reconciles consumer needs with sustainability goals.
Figure 1: Profitable or customer-oriented business model and sustainable business model show a little intersection.
APPROACH
A case study for our users described the problem of our client. Learning objectives were "Empathising", "Business Model Design", "Evaluation of Competitiveness", among others.
The case study was published on BeeUp. Over three months, BeeUp teams with 497 participants developed solutions on how to solve the challenge. The participants came from all continents and worked in different functions and industries.
Our coaches accompanied the participants with virtual coaching. The coachings are necessary. While crowdsourcing is very creative, creativity alone is not enough for a successful business model innovation. The result must be implementable!
The goal was to consider the customer segment's "convenience" as a given and use this framework condition to achieve the set vision. In other words: To see the problem as part of the solution. The following questions were often discussed in the coaching session: How can convenience be used to develop a sustainable business model? And also: What are the different needs of diverse customer segments? How to use a specific value proposition to tackle the challenge?
Thus, by this approach, the upper Venn diagram breaks down into a largely overlapping set:
Figure 2: Sustainability and profitability or customer orientation are no longer contradictory if you use the root cause of the problem as the key to the solution. The solutions also become more elegant.
RESULT
The result is the intellectual property of our client, and an out-of-the-box solution. The new business model allows various stakeholders in the ecosystem to earn money. And the incentives are set so that ecological action in circular value chains pays off. The winner of the competition - a consultant from Singapore - not only presented a "Documented Value Proposition", i.e. profitability calculations for the new segment if they buy our client's market offering, but also a prioritised plan on how to approach the customers.
THE GOOD THING WAS
A big plus was: our client did not need to make any investments as the solution was a perfect fit to the existing core competence. A result of the coaching! The client was able to implement the business model from day one.
Other excellent teams came from the USA (group from a renowned MBA programme), Germany & Guatemala (logistics consultants from Hamburg), Botswana, Italy, Malaysia, Ghana and Spain. Among other things, our client knows how the European market is approached best and how the sales channels to the US Army look like. So it's a good plan for later.
Fig. 3: Also the winners of the competition came from around the world.
If you are curious about how your business model can meet the challenge of sustainability while strengthening profitability, please get in touch with me.
