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May 28, 2010

Dear Free-riders, Strategists, Executives,

I hope everyone is having a good Spring. With this episode of the portal, I am going to introduce to you a few models of innovation and articulate through the corresponding podcast how a cash-cow business model can be built off your technology platforms and associated services. What is posited in the podcast are a few simple truths about winning strategies in the hyper-competitive high-tech space:

1. It is not just products, it is also the process, stupid!
2. It is no more only about products, it is also about platforms, stupid!
2. It is not only about products and platforms, it is also about services, stupid!

Platform / Service Innovations and Cash-Cow Business Models

In the following framework, what is posited on the left is the emergence of a dominant product design sometime around the intersection of the product and process innovation curves. This is intuitive, since a company initially focuses on building a core product out to market, and there is usually a lot of innovation around the product, until a dominant design emerges. Around that time, the rate of innovation at the business process level usually is on the rise, and this is depicted by the graph on the left, where the two blue hills of the product and process innovation charts intersect:



Similarly, what you see on the right hand side above are two curves depicting the rates of innovation at the technology platform level and at the services level respectively, as functions of time. The point in time where they intersect is also the time around which business focus has to shift from creating the world's best platform to servicing the customers who are using the platform. At this point in time, the rate of services innovation is still increasing even as the rate of platform innovation is on the decline.

What this platform-services innovation map depicts is a practical truth: before a business starts making boatloads of cash, it has to innovate its platform to a sufficient commercially optimized level, and also has to start working on its services as well. In a nutshell, cash-cow businesses now a days are not only about products or platforms, they are also about services. Listen to the corresponding podcast to learn more about ongoing platform battlegrounds ranging from social networking (Facebook / MySpace) to smart mobile handhelds (Google Android / Apple iPhone), and how the cash-cow business model evolves at the cusp of platform and service innovation...

Enjoy the podcast, and spread the word about this and other tech strategy podcasts with your friends and colleagues.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Sam Mishra
President, FranTerActive
e-mail: sam (at) franteractive.net
Twitter:
@franteractive







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