A couple notes on business models and life models, and links to many cool people and projects.
Trolling, Bratislava, Slovakia, Sept 2009
Disparate but related thoughts, projects and people:
- Mike Masnick, DRM Doesn’t Enable Business Models; Blind Fear Disables Business Models:
[DRM] cannot enable a new business model economically. That’s because it’s only purpose is to limit behavior. There are no business models that are based solely on limiting behavior.
I hadn’t thought about business models in this way before; but as David Sanger pointed out to me over Twitter, others have, pointing out two highly relevant points by Umair Haque on property rights, noting “property rights have to provide … value when bundled with goods … current licenses only subtract value” and “consumers may be willing to pay for the good … but … likely not interested in paying for restrictions in consuming the good”.
- As much as I’m intrigued by Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, I’m fascinated by the operational and business model behind the book itself. Alexander Osterwalder explains more about the process and learnings from creating the book in The Challenges of an Innovation Journey (an Author’s Perspective).
- Shifting from business model generation to life model generation, the Institute of You (@instituteofyou) is career growth subscription service that uses a mix of exercises, methods and mediums to guide people to finding work and life fulfillment. I haven’t tried the service yet, although I’m sure I could use it.
Combined with Kareem Mayan’s Find Your Purpose Newsletter (here’s how Kareem found his purpose), I seem to be bumping into (online and offline) a lot of like-minded people working hard to help people define their lives. Thank you, and keep it coming, please.
(Thank you to Alan Smith for introducing me to Institute of You.)
- I mentioned this on tumblr earlier, but I’ll mention it again. One of the keys to living a cool life is to keep creating new, awesome, meaningful, powerful, inclusive, valuable and simply fun ways to live.
As a lover of awesomeness I’m biased, but the Cause It’s My Birthday philanthropic campaign / birthday party / life escapade by Sloane Berrent and Doug Campbell is simply too cool not to support.
- What’s the tie between these thoughts? Business models based on creating value and expanding the pie are more powerful than business models based on allocating and extracting value; lives focused on creating, aggregating and directing value to others are more powerful than lives focused merely on the extracting value for the self.
Consider what businesses and lives you’re supporting.
