Navigating Business model innovations

Day 1 - Topic 4

Speakers

Session Replay

Session Overview

IDH demo-ed their Innovation Platform on each day, with a focus on Developing Service Coalitions and Gender Business Model Transformation. In terms of Service Coalitions the benefits were clear, especially where there is complementarity and synergy, however the development of a coalition takes time and upfront investment is needed (Donors take note!). This development phase must ensure the right partners are selected and this process is often under-estimated, with stumbling blocks often being around data sharing and other intellectual property issues.

"A startup can already have an advanced level of management capacities. On the contrary, a cooperative existing for more than 10 years can still have a basic level of management capacities."

Mathilde Bauwin

Break Out Group Discussion

The discussion highlighted the differing practices and perspectives on segmentation. This included segmentation by:

type of issue faced by the SME, to identify the main pain points and design a pathway to resolve one issue at a time
business stage (early stage, growing, mature) and by position in the value chain (to deal with technical and business issues specific to this position)

The discussion whether segmenting by level of management capacity seemed relevant or not was considered “very interesting” but the discussion was inconclusive.

Several actors shared that the most impactful support is customized/tailored individual support, and the conversation turned around “how to customize support as much as possible”.

It therefore may be that future learning should examine how to find the right balance between extreme standardization (which may seem more cost efficient but may be less effective/impactful) and extreme customization (which is likely to be more impactful but much less efficient in terms of cost but also more generally as it may lead to reinvent the wheel each time without relying on the experience with “similar” organisations). This learning may be more important than trying to refine segmentation criteria any further……at this point.