Hey guys,

Hope you had a good Christmas and are doing “good work” during these last few days of the year. I just read one of the older articles from the Dachis group where funnily enough, it wasn’t until the very end of the article that my eyes opened to the fact that this was one of the basic concepts that we all learned during our ITM700 course (for those of us who have taken ITM 700, but I think people in Business Management actually learned this a lot earlier as well).

This model where organizations are made up of People, Process, and Technology is one of the “as broad as you can get” models of enterprise architecture that looks at how organizations are made up. It basically says that orgs. are made up of: People in the business who have knowledge and skills, business process that are defined in how people carry out actions that create value for the org, and technology that supports people and the processes.

What this Dachis Group blog post does is show People Process and Technology and how it makes up the resources needed by an org to successfully implement and scale an effective twitter team for near real-time customer support.

Personally I find it greatly enjoying when some of the basic models that we learn in school are adapted beyond what we are taught, and shown in the context of supporting an organization that is much more socially aligned than what we’ve been exposed to.

Where else have you seen academic models or ideas adapted and used in the business?

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STEM of an IDEA

“STEM is an acronym you can see and hear all around the world as the intellectual ad campaign for “Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.” Indeed STEM is an important factor in achieving innovations today, but it’s only half of the puzzle — there needs to be a humanizing force to any invention for it to become relevant and important. What’s missing is the raison d’etre of a STEM outcome. That could only come from an IDEA-based approach — “Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art.” In this new century, whole-innovation will emerge naturally from the marriage of STEM together with IDEA.”

While we would love to see Ryerson put on some more events in the heart of TED that exposes people to different points of view on the ideas they study everyday, as broad as our themes are for this year’s Connect IT Conference, there’s still a lot more explore.

This year we want to give people an introduction to looking at the future of business and innovation in a large part through the lens of Design and Technology. Even then though, there are still 6 different themes to explore.

Presented by Alexander Osterwalder, author, Business Model Generation

Business Model Knowledge Fair, Amsterdam

View more documents from Alexander Osterwalder.

Marc Sniukas  » Blog Archive  » On the difference between Strategic Innovation and Business Model Innovation

- The Sequence and Outcomes of Strategic Innovation

Defining Strategic Innovation

“If you look at common definitions of strategic innovation from academic and professional publications, you can observe the following three outcomes of strategic innovation:

Strategic innovation leads to either:

• new business models (including a new value chain architecture), or
• new markets (either by creating new ones or reshaping existing ones), or
• increased value for both the customer and the company
  or a combination of these three.

Drawing upon the above said, strategic innovation can be defined as:

• a framework of interdependent content, process and context dimensions,
• facilitating the application of creativity and innovation to strategic management
• in order to enable strategic differentiation and competitive advantage,
• by challenging conventional logic and redefining the company’s business model, redrawing market boundaries, creating new markets and value improvements for customers and the company itself.”

The Business Model Canvas

This image is the business model canvas. A model designed to help teams develop a common understanding of what a business model is, and a common language for discussing them. It does this while staying simple, and understandable, without overloading beginners.

It is the start of our thinking about business models.

“The business model is like a blueprint for a strategy to be implemented through organizational structures, processes, and systems.”

Learn more about the Business Model canvas by downloading the Business Model Generation Preview ebook (pdf).

Our first featured book on the Connect IT blog is Tom Kelly’s The Ten Faces Of Innovation. Our featured books are some of the best readings available on themes and ideas related to the Connect IT theme for 2010.

The Ten Faces of Innovation gives managers a new understanding of what personas build up teams with the creativity and capacity to generate creative strategies and new products.

While in business school we are encouraged to work in teams for many of our group projects, and when it comes to our cap-stone courses or even going through MBAs at Ryerson, we are encouraged to work with people going through the different majors be it in Business Management: Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Management, HR, or on the ITM side of things: ERP, Knowledge Management, Digital Media, or Application Development. This book breaks that mold.

The Ten Faces of Innovation explores the value of including in your teams people who represent one or more of 10 different personas:

• The Anthropologist
• The Experimenter
• The Cross-Pollinator
• The Hurdler
• The Collaborator
• The Director
• The Experience Architect
• The Set Designer
• The Story Teller
• The Caregiver

Just like in the balance between business and IT, the goal isn’t to be able to do everything, but as teams work together understanding the different roles, and how each team member contributes is essential.

This book goes beyond just defining each persona and helps us understand the barriers that prevent organizations from being creative, and how the personas can work together to create new value.

Photo Credit: wilkins lee

Jeff Dachis (The Dachis Group) on Social Business Design (via alambke)

As we introduce you to another important theme of Connect IT in 2010, we might as well start from the top! The Dachis Group can be said to be the only organization with such a thorough thinking of social business design, and application of how businesses can use social software strategically.

If what he says seems vague, in the next few months hopefully we’ll help you develop a real understanding of what social business design is all about.

There are many posts, and media we have lined up to share with you as we dive into these ideas.