Skype Business Model

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Section C. Undertake a review of one entrepreneurship topic that is of particular interest to you. Business Model Canvas and St. Gallen Business Model Navigator: A Comparative Analysis 1. Introduction In future, competition “takes place not between products or companies, but between business models". Gary Hamel, world's most influential business thinker, Wall Street Journal, 2008 Success stories like Amazon and Skype impressively show how innovative business models (BM) can pressure or even replace an industry’s incumbents. Amazon revolutionized retailing by guaranteeing the greatest possible accessibility to products via its website. Skype, by contrast, reshaped the telecommunications industry by using the Peer to Peer technology in order…show more content…
This approach is based upon nine fundamental building blocks as BM elements, illustrated within the Business Model Canvas (see Figure 1). The customer segments are the starting point. They are reached with a value proposition via channels. The customer relationship is the basis for retaining these customer segments. Products and services create the value proposition and generate revenue from customers. Through resources and activities, products and services are created. Finally, products and services cause costs and can be provided by…show more content…
By confronting the current BM with the 55 BM patterns, the transformation into a new, innovative BM is intended. According to Gassmann et al. (2014), an innovative BM does not overemphasize today’s customer requirements, but anticipates future needs of customers. Subsequent to breaking with the dominant industry logic in the Ideation section, the potential ideas that have been generated are organized in form of a BM in the Integration section. The objective is to achieve internal (=company requirements) and external (=environment) consistency. A BM becomes internally consistent by aligning the four core dimensions (who-what-how-why). External consistency, by contrast, concentrates on attaining a fit between the company’s environment and the new BM. According to Gassmann et al. (2014), the Realization and, thus, the Implementation of the new BM design in practice is the most difficult challenge when innovating BMs. The authors argue that this complexity is caused by resistance coming from the market, partners and employees. Therefore, they recommend rapid prototyping, in order to test the new BM on a small scale. This iterative, three-step cycle approach consists of the elements (1) design, (2) prototype and (3) test. By receiving feedback, new valuable input for the design of the next iteration stage is generated. As the number of iterations rises, the final market introduction of the new BM becomes more
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