Moving toward business models of a new kind : the example of “Danone Supporting Life”

One thing is sure : the “after the crisis world” will be very different from what it was before. It may seem obvious, but if we have a closer look at what happened in the past, we have to admit many upturns consisted of the rebuilding of what used to exist as it was. This time it seems that both economy and society learned things.

• growth is not and endless spiral. Especially if you want it to be strong.

• whoever creates value for onself while destroying value for the others will be impacted by the economical consequences of his behaviors one day or the orther.

• Companies are parts of an ecosystem (customers, suppliers, employess…). If a part of this ecosystem collapses, the company will soon follow because when value is destroyed at its periphery, it destroyes its own potential markets.

• Growing by developping new markets is healthier than using financial lever to balance the fact its current markets are finite.

• People, at the same time employees, clients, and member of the society, now want to fully play their part and judge corporate behaviors according to these lessons.

All this things are worth because management and work models will be impacted by these societal facts and, in the same way, being successful in this new context will imply new internal practices. This teaches us, once again, that the current crisis is not as economic as it may seem.

This can lead to predict the advent of business models of a new kind, close to Umair Haque’s smart Growth Manifesto d’Umair Haque. But many people wonder when it will happen and how it may look like. A first example is coming from France with “Danone Supporting Life”.

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Enterprise 2.0 : the CISCO case

You must have noticed how many posts have been published about Cisco these late days. The US giant seems to be the first example of global enterprise 2.0 or, at least, to be the first to meet such a recognition for its success. Many things have been writen about that and it will be easy for you to find informations.

In order to understand more globally what happended at Cisco I found an interesting speech Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, made on the 15th of october at the MIT.

What can we draw from thay ?

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Enterprise 2.0 : my predictions for 2009

Honestly I was not sure I would conform to the annual predictions tradition. Finally, since my 2008 edition was not that bad (shift from “social tools at people’s disposal” to the acknowledgement it needed inclusion in business process) and Susan kindly asks for it, I’ll try to do something interesing this year.

That said, I will divide my note in two parts. As any good “thoughtleader” sometimes mistake predictions for his own wishes, I’ll try to be lucid enough to clearly separate both and end my note with a few pious hopes.

Let’s start !

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Is web 2.0 dead or is business replacing buzzyness ?

You must have felt this agitation that went through the blogosphere these last day, but that was also relayed by traditional medias. Web 2.0 is dead. The rumor didn’t start from this note from Michael Arrington but since he’s got a bigger loudhailer than most of the population his voice carried farer. Then hundreds if not thousands of people predicted the end of web 2.0.

I can’t see anything particularly cleaver when some people say that when the economy’s going through hard times, the more fragile companies may come off badly. Among those companies there’s no need to have a second sight to guess all those that operates on an emerging market may be concerned, which is the case for web 2.0 startups…but not only. Not enough to convince me of real soothsayer abilities, nor to applause such perceptiveness, knowing it’s easy to ring the alarm when the city is burning just when you’ve been knowing fire raisers were at work for a long time. Those who were pushing for “everything 2.0″ even without sense or business model, prefering the “buzzyness model” could wonder about their past analysis. They themselves killed “their” web 2.0, turning it into a hudge holdall where they put everything and anything. But once smoke will be gone, many interesting things will remain, the only things that value creation can rely on, that makes it possible to build real business models. For this reason, I see these troubled times we’re experiencing as a salutary stabilization phase. I’ll end with a comparison with our late web 1.0. Even if some babies were thrown with the bathwater, companies that adresses a real need, that delivered a real valuable service, survived the crisis and are still alive.

In brief, I’d rather rank the “web 2.0 is dead” buzzword in the “who lives on noise can only survive making more noise” category.

So, what’s about Enterprise 2.0 ?

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