Category Archives: Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading: The Business Model Navigator

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A strong business model is the bedrock to business success…. And to Sustainability !
But all too often we fail to adapt, clinging to outdated models that are no longer delivering the results we need.
The brains behind The Business Model Navigator have discovered that just 55 business models are responsible for 90% of the world’s most successful businesses. These 55 models – from the Add-On model used by Ryanair to the Subscription model used by Spotify – provide the blueprints you need to revolutionise your business and drive powerful change.
As well as providing a practical framework for adapting and innovating your business model, this book also includes each of the 55 models in a quick-read format.
Source: BMI Lab AG, adapted from: Amazon.

For further information go to: http://www.bmilab.com/

Recommended Reading: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers – By Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

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Recommended reading for everyone who plans to build a new, sustainable businesss model.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.
Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model–or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”

Source: Strategyzer

Recommended Reading: Portfolio for the Planet: Lessons from 10 Years of Impact Investing 1st Edition – by Tammy E. Newmark

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Rapid growth of the global economy has accelerated the degradation of the Earth’s most important asset: the environment. Increasing poverty and challenges arising from climate change further threaten the planet’s natural systems. With a rising global population, the demand on natural resources to cover even basic human needs is intensifying – supporting businesses that promote the sustainable use of natural resources and help ensure their long-term viability is imperative. As part of a pioneering movement to harness business towards effecting environmental change, The Nature Conservancy launched EcoEnterprises Fund in 2000 to provide investment capital to grow small “eco”-businesses in Latin America. There is a compelling need for financing this niche. Companies of this size truly drive change – creating the engine for economic activity and generating livelihoods for bottom of the pyramid rural peoples which brings about positive social and conservation impacts.
EcoEnterprises Fund’s portfolio highlights twenty-three cutting-edge companies, in expanding sectors such as organic agriculture, ecotourism, sustainable forestry, and non-timber forest products which include innovative industry first-movers―from organic shrimp to biodynamic flowers, and ready-to-drink smoothies made from the latest Amazonian berry. With a successful ten-year track record, EcoEnterprises Fund has valuable learning to share – from what pitfalls to avoid when structuring investments to what types of assistance entrepreneurs in these emerging environmental sectors need most. Portfolio for the Planet translates a decade of experience into accessible lessons for both veterans and newcomers in the field: for those interested in investing in sustainable businesses, discovering novel approaches to environmental conservation, or seeing entrepreneurs pursue their dreams.
Source: EcoEnterprises Fund. Retrieved from: www.ecoenterprisesfund.com