Im happy to share that the International Business Innovation Association (InBIA) will kick off its 30thInternational Conference on Business Incubation with Alex Osterwalder as the opening keynote. Osterwalder invented the Bus
iness Model Canvas and is the lead author of the Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design books, which sold over a million copies in 37 languages. I was fortunate to have taken Osterwalders masterclass and have been teaching the methodology to Business Incubators all over the world. Having him speak at the largest gathering of business incubator managers in the world is very good news indeed.
Read InBIA’s press release here.
The conference will take place April 16-20, 2016 in Orlando, Fla. Registration for the conference is now open, click here for more information.
Last month our team traveled to Guadalajara Mexico to run our Business Model Canvas training at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. We were treated to working with the director of the University’s business incubator. As always during these visits, we experienced her enthusiasm as she gave us a tour of her facility and introduced us to her entrepreneurs with the pride any mother would feel for her own kids.
During this same trip we stopped by Guadalajara’s best rated coworking space “Nevermind”. We walked in unannounced, but the young lady at reception welcomed us warmly and offered us a tour. She took us around, explained how the space worked and gave us the backstory to its development. She obviously knew her members well and spoke of the space’s culture knowledgeably.
The two experiences got me thinking about community champions. The National Business Incubation Association has found that one of the keys to an incubation programs success is who heads it, and recent coworking research mirrors the finding. The community champion has to have a unique combination of qualities, which include being giving, outgoing and serviceable. But what about the skills they need to have in order to do their job properly?
- Community building – the difference between a real estate play and an entrepreneurial program is the people. Entrepreneurs can learn business skills in many different places both in person and online, paid or free. What they cannot get anywhere else is community, that group of people they interact with on a regular basis that knows what is going on in his or her life and cares. The champion has to understand how people like to work and how they interact in order to create that sense of belonging that keeps entrepreneurs engaged.
- Community curation – Making sure the members are comfortable and productive in the space means making sure new additions fit the culture. The champion needs to be able to create an intake process for new members conducive to maintaining an environment of collaboration. The champion should also try to include new members whose activities are complimentary to existing members without being competitive.
- Program management – besides the people aspect of a champion’s job is the administrative role. The champion will have to track member’s activities, whether for billing purposes in a coworking environment or for program participation in an incubation/acceleration environment. He will also have to ensure the facility is clean and operational at all times and know how to allocate time and usage in shared spaces. Finally he will be anticipating member needs through intake documentation such as lease, membership agreement, member/client manual, as well as ongoing notices of changes and updates in policies.
One way a champion can learn these skills is through an apprenticeship with an experienced manager. However, since that is not always available, many online resources are a good start. The National Business Incubation Association provides valuable training for incubator managers and the Global Coworking Conference Unconference provides learning opportunities for coworking champions. If you need more in depth training, we offer an online and in-person option for both coworking and incubation champions that is available on a continuous basis.
We’ve developed an exciting and unique process for evaluating and implementing new coworking spaces within business incubators that we call “design-build-execute.” The process is already in effect and showing great success. The three-stage process allows us to help you to decide if you have all the information and resources you need in order to foster a successful and fun coworking space within your incubator, and then to proceed with building and implementation.
In the design phase, we factor in all the qualities that make up an effective coworking space, and then utilize these factors in designing your own totally unique workspace. These factors include traffic flow, creation of different types of offices, resident and rotating desks, conference rooms, and casual spaces, special lighting, access to business equipment—overall efficiency of the entire space. Also extremely important is the human appeal factor—how desirable the space is in terms of comfort, stimulation, relaxation, community-building, and esthetic appeal—and how good the coffee is! (See our last Blog, Why Some Coworking Space Fail and others Prevail.)
In the build phase, we monitor every step in the construction of the coworking space according to the design parameters we have agreed upon, to create with you a beautiful, user-friendly, efficient, appealing space that will encourage both members and clients to linger and continue to enjoy the space. Finding the right Community Manager also becomes critically important in this phase. We also help you to implement a champion-growing program, in which particularly enthusiastic members of the community are trained and groomed to take on more and more responsibility, with the goal of them eventually becoming managers themselves.
In the execute phase, we launch your coworking model into a beta space, during which everyone involved discovers what works and what may need to be improved upon. A period of beta time is critical in order to create a truly effective coworking space that genuinely meets the needs of all its members. Changes can still be implemented during this phase, according to feedback and input from everyone involved in the project.
For a coworking space to truly succeed, member (and client) needs and desires must be considered and factored in, and changes made organically. Management must be willing to listen to members’ input, and flex along with it, if the space is going to evolve into a beautiful, community-minded, and highly desirable place to work, a space in which members can meet and greet and share information and new ideas, and stimulate each other to call upon their own creativity to solve their work and/or design challenges. Above all, a good coworking space should be a fun place to work, such that members and clients go home at the end of a busy day feeling good about themselves and the way they have just passed their time!
You are busy advising your clients, promoting your program in the community and keeping income and expenses balanced. Do you have time to scour the hundreds of magazine articles, blogs and research papers available to keep yourself current in the entrepreneurship support field?
Over the past 7 years, since I founded Varela Consulting, I have worked with many of you on projects, leading trainings and supporting your programs. I have enjoyed visiting your facilities, getting to know your teams and more than anything watching your programs evolve.
This year, I have set out to find a way to make the information you need available to more entrepreneurship professionals. Until today only those who brought us on for a project or to train on a particular topic could access our specialized and curated knowledge base.
Today I am happy to introduce our new newsletter and redesigned website where we will deliver the most up to date information about developing and managing your entrepreneurship program.
I also want to issue a warm welcome to Varela Consulting’s new team member Stephanie Bermudez. Stephanie has a successful background in coworking and will be sharing her experience and best practices with our community. You can read her bio on our website and feel free to reach out to her at sbermudez@varelaconsulting.com.
Enjoy this first issue of our newsletter and please let us know if you have suggestions for what you would like to see in future editions.
I fell in love with the Business Model Canvas the first time I leafed through the book. After so many years of guiding entrepreneurs through the business development process with the inadequate tool known as the business plan, finally I stumbled onto a method that kept it simple and allowed for experimentation on the business before committing resources.
I truly just stumbled on the now well-known book by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, a couple of years ago, riding in the back seat of a car through the streets of Mexico City. My colleague from NBIA Tom Strodtbeck rode in the front seat with our host Carlos Maynor Salinas, then Director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Business Incubation Network, who had invited us to speak to the managers of the incubators in his network. As they carried on a conversation I couldn’t hear over traffic noise, I distractedly looked around where I sat. I saw a book full of drawings on the cover that immediately caught my attention. Business Model Generation read the title and as I browsed through the pages I recognized a tool that would have important implications for our industry.
Fast forward to November 2013, and I am now in San Francisco participating in a workshop led by none other than Osterwalder himself. I will add there was a guest appearance by Steve Blank that really put the icing on an already outstanding two days of learning. I now understand a few things about the canvas that were novel to me and I hope are useful to you:
- The canvas was not created for start-ups. I expected to be in a room full of incubator managers, consultants and entrepreneurs. Instead, I was surrounded by people from mature, established companies like Clorox. As Osterwalder explained, these companies must innovate their business model or expect to go the way of Kodak. That was the motivation behind his research and his book.
- It doesn’t matter where you start. Most of us have read through the book and have this idea to start from the right and work towards the left. You identify your Customer Segment then work your way through Value Proposition and finally Key Partners. However, I learned that you can start anywhere, with the Value Proposition, Key Activities, Revenue Streams, or any of the boxes. The point is to make sure you have filled in all the boxes and assigned at least one value proposition for every customer segment you identify.
- You don’t stop at one- or two, or three. I have worked with many entrepreneurs and it always seemed like I ended up with 4 or 5 canvases for a business, which left me feeling like that was somehow wrong. In the workshop, we learned the real value of the canvas is that you can create as many versions of a business as you can imagine- in fact it is recommended that you do. The goal is not to find a business model that works, the goal is to find the one that works best. And to do that you must come up with as many versions as possible, rule out the crazy ones, and dive deeper into a few that make sense.
Have you used the canvas with your entrepreneurs? Has it made the business ideation process easier or have you not seen an advantage? Please share your experience!
Are you interested in learning the Business Model Generation methodology and making it available to your entrepreneurs? I am happy to introduce a workshop I developed based on the Business Model Generation methodology, designed for both existing businesses and star-ups. The workshop stems from my experience with many companies using the Business Model Canvas over the past couple of years, and the unique experience of participating in a workshop led by author Alex Osterwalder. I created this workshop, which can be offered as a one or two day program, to enable entrepreneurship programs and business incubators to make the process available to its clients. We will be running the first two workshops in English and Spanish in Los Angeles at the end of January and in Corpus Cristi in March. Interested in hosting the workshop? Contact us at info@varelaconsulting.com.
Happy modeling!