Take the latest controversy about Abercrombie & Fitch, an American retailer for casual wear. See here (forbes.com), here (Los Angeles Times) or here (Daily Mail, UK).

Abercrombie & Fitch offers no women’s XL or XXL because they don’t want big women to wear their brand. Their value proposition is clear: They want the cool kids as customers. They do not consider big women as cool.

Mike Jeffries is the man behind A&F. In an interview with Salon Magazine in 2006 he told, when asked about the emotional experience in his shops:

“It’s almost everything. That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people.”

That is the reason why they offer nothing for big ladies. That is their choice. They discriminate big ladies, but you as customers have the choice as well. You are not forced to buy at A&F. I do not buy at A&F because I do like their attitude. However, they have a value proposition that is clearly distinguished from their competitors. And that is what I like and adore. They stick to their mantra even under severe pressure from the public.

Take other firms, Apple or Zara. They also discriminate. Apple’s Operating System is a closed system and either you take or leave it. At Zara, you also have no extra large sizes.

H&M, Dove: The opposite can be right as well

Interestingly, other firms like H&M or Dove have a different approach to big or natural ladies. H&M offers a H&M+ collection for larger women. H&M uses for the photo shooting a plus-sized model. Dove created a different mantra for women: “You are more beautiful than you think!”. The video was watched 53 million (May 15, 2013) times on YouTube. Dove fosters the self-esteem of the ladies.

What is great about all three firms is that they have a clear value position people talk about. A&F has a controversial value proposition. But at least, they have one. H&M and Dove is doing the opposite. And that works as well. What does not work is to have a fuzzy and boring value proposition where you want to be everything to everybody.

A great business model is also about what you do not do

A great business model is all about what you do and what you do not do. The negative definition of what you do not do must be part of any clear value position. Who are not your customers? And with the exclusion you decide not to be loved by everybody. This is fine, and actually, good, because then you have at least a clear cut position in the market.

The curse of size

The more a firm wants to grow, the more it has to compromise its value proposition. If you focus on all customer segments, you have no focus. That is the curse of large firms. The larger you get, the more difficult it is to stick to your position. Sometimes, it works like with IKEA, but often it does not work.

The curse of being well liked

Think about Willy Loman, the salesman in “Death of a salesman”. He always wants to be well liked by everybody. The bitter end is his funeral. Instead of being “massive” with people coming from other states, his funeral is his final humiliation since nobody shows up except for the family.

Think about bankrupt companies. How many did weep when Karstadt went bankrupt or when Quelle disappeared from the market? Few, but of course the employees as a kind of family. However, if customers do not care, then you have no right to be as a company. And they care if you have something special to say. 

And that is bad. Bad for us, because we loose 600 subscribers that have a huge loyalty to this blog. And bad for you, since you do not get actively informed when we have fresh content. There is only one way to avoid this. You have to move.

• The fastest way is that you subscribe with your email to the blog. For this service, we use Google Feedburner (hope they keep at least this service). As you know us, we do not publish too many articles so your risk to be spammed is zero. Actually, we look for articles from the community about business model innovation.
• You move to another RSS reader. There are plenty of articles on the best alternatives to Google Reader like this on from The Verve or from lifehacker.  The best is that you can export your feeds into the new reader easily. Feedly, a favorite of many, has a build-in function to connect with Google Reader and will import all your feeds directly into Feedly. The second alternative is to export your feeds into the new reader. Mashable explains this option. A very clean reader, that is very close to the user experience of Google Reader, is The Old Reader.

So act now!

Hope to see you on another RSS reader or as an email subscriber.

Thank you very much.

Patrick

You might have realized that I have written just a few post in the last months. The reason is very simple. I have teamed up with Thomas Meyer, a young,  unconventional bestseller author, Gottschalk & Ash, a design agency and Wolfsburg AG, an innovation agency to develop a toolbox for entrepreneurs.

The work with Thomas and the others is absolutely stunning but also very time consuming since we do not like to stick to the first best solution but thrive for the best.

And this means a lot of iterations and testing. E.g. we decided to write in a thought provoking, easy to read and funny style, Thomas is well known for. But of course, this irritated our sponsor at the beginning. They expected a semi-scientific work adapted to entrepreneurs. However, we thought there are enough boring books out there so we decided to be different and hopefully better.

Bringing the whole team behind the same ideas and values takes time. However, this is extremely important since otherwise we cannot shoot for the stars. Later the customers have to decide if they like what we have developed. But of course, we have tested the toolbox with a variety of entrepreneurs. We used it with social entrepreneurs at the Hub Zurich. Students at the University of St. Gallen developed stunning ideas that made already an impact in the life of other students. We tested it at the Entrepreneurship Summit in Berlin, etc. All of this takes time, but makes the tool box better. Thanks for all the feedback and ideas we got.

The bad news for most of readers is: The toolbox will be in German. The reason is very simple. Since we are German-speakers and live in German-speaking countries, we believe that we have to give something back. We believe that in Germany, Switzerland and Austria we need more, better and more creative startups. And if we can make a small contribution to this, that would be awesome. It is striking that the first ideas about the business model innovation concept emerged in Switzerland at the end of the 1990s. Alex is also Swiss by the way. It is fun to see an idea spreading worldwide from a country most people expect watches to come from but not management trends.

And since we want to foster entrepreneurship in all parts of society we decided to write in plain and simple German with little Fachvokabular (technical vocabulary). This is pretty tricky and needed a lot of creativity to explain the most essentials ideas in a very understandable language. Particularly, since a business model describes briefly all disciplins of businesses (marketing, sales, operation management, financials, HR, leadership) on a card. That is a challenge.

Your help is needed

So here come the two requests:

• For all German speakers, if you like the idea about the toolbox, please enter your mail in our list so we can inform you about the progress.
• The second request goes to all experts in business model innovation, strategic innovation management, customer insights via jobs-to-be done technique or entrepreneurial design. If you would like to contribute to this blog, we would love to hear from you. This blog is not my personal blog, but a blog about business model innovations. We look for cases, though provoking ideas, reflection but not for PR material. The average post has around 3.000-5.000 readers but this depends very much on the topic. Most articles are typical “long-readers” and reference articles that attract a lot of traffic via Google. A typical article is “Who says paper is dead?” with almost 9.000 visitors. And of course, the article will be published under the name of the other.

In the next months we have many challenges ahead with our toolbox. One is that we need a publisher who is willing to accept new business models in the publishing industry like publishing under Creative Commons or finding creative ways to bundle the books for teams. Will be an interesting journey.

Thanks for all your support and ideas.

Cheers Patrick

Of course, most clients will say yes in any survey or in sales negotiation. Actually, there are departments at your clients that know only two words: Too expensive!! Give me rebates! That is the purchasing department and it is their job to negotiate the price of a purchase. However, is this true, that even for B2B customers only the price is important?

Observe the jobs-to-be-done of your customers. Don’t ask the customers

Let’s take an example from RWE, a huge German utility firm. Let’s take the case they need to purchase electronic testing equipment. Nothing fancy, just a plain vanilla device for 30 to 50 Euro. Traditionally, this purchase would be a C category purchase. C means not critically important to the firm and therefore the firm usually shops around among different suppliers for a good price.

So you would assume that price is the decisive criteria for a firm to purchase from you. And yes, if you survey customers what is important in their decision to purchase C goods, the price will be on top.

So, all B2B marketplaces of the late 1990s and early 2000s like Onvia had the value proposition that price of the goods are the most important criteria for the B2B market. So they offered everything economics told them what to do in a price sensitive market: Make auctions, offer pool buying for larger quantities or make requests for proposals.

Not the price of the good is important but the whole cost of purchasing

However, they had to learn the hard way (most disappeared from the market) that this is not the case. Let’s go back to the testing device of 30 to 50 Euro at RWE. Saving an extra 20% on a purchase of 50 Euro is great. But is it just 10 Euro. But the costs for the internal purchasing process can easily be 150 to 200 Euro for the traditional process according to Karl Czech from RWE purchasing. So if you see the total price of purchasing (TPPs), you immediately see where your value proposition should be based upon.

Yes, customers are very price sensitive but not for the single price of a good but for TPP of it. The TPP is the price for the good and the costs of process of purchasing it. So if you lower the cost for the process and make the life of your customer easier, better and thereby cheaper, you can charge more for your product.

That’s what the guys from Mercateo, a German B2B marketplace had to learn over the last ten years. Luckily, their learned it in time and observed their customers. Yes, at the beginning they also followed the crowds and the market analysis that B2B will be a huge market like 180 other B2B market places did in Germany alone during the new economy hype.

But over time they discovered that the price for a good is just one part of the total equation.

Lessons learned

• A good value proposition does not start with the product. It starts with understanding who is your customer and what job you solve. Think about Krinners Christmas tree stand and the badly solved job to put easily the Christmas tree straight up.
• Then you define what benefit you create for your customer and how you solve the job-to-be-done.
• Then you compose the rest of your business model to fulfill the value proposition.

All other components than have to fulfill the value proposition. It is not just the product or your services but all other building blocks. Think about it, how badly a business will perform if it claims that it has the best customer service in the world, but then treats its employers badly and you feel this on the hotline or in the shop.

Here are the core questions, you have to answer for a great value proposition.

You can either start with pain points or gain points as Alex has shown recently in a post but you should always ask what job you solve for your customer. And that can either be a pain killers or gain creators for your customers. However, focus on Customers’ jobs.

All the best to my American friends and readers. Hope this post finds you well after Sandy!

Case and figures are taken from brand eins, a great German business magazine. I did not crosscheck the information. Source: Frank Pollack “Spätes Glück” in: brand eins, Juni 2012, pp. 74-79

The challenge: boring and uninspiring banking

The challenge is simple. Retail and e-Banking in the current form is quite 1.0. Most eBanking or payment systems use the traditional business model and transferred the traditional model online. So we have a banking 1.0 online. Boring, dull, uninspiring.

Now, the challenge is: What will be banking 2.0 look like?

What would make you say: “Wow, they really got it. You have to try it. It’s cool and just helped me to make my life easier and better.”

Your unsolved or badly solved jobs in personal finance

But before we look at the solutions I would like to raise the questions what are unsolved jobs in your personal finances. What annoys you? What is great and more people should know about? What are needs you think are so obvious, that there should be solutions to it?

Personal finance can anything from cash management, expense management, payments, saving and investing, financing your house or your car, saving for the silver age (pensions) etc… If you have a family, think about your family financial affairs. If you are a patchwork family, what are special jobs there?

Your solutions, please!

The second question is about solutions. What solutions do we need in banking 2.0? What products or services you would love to see?

Please use the comment function for your unsolved-jobs or ideas or the open innovation platform atizo, where I have set up a project “banking 2.0” for us. Please feel free to use both or just the one that suits you most.

We do not like blanks. Long pauses in a conversation confuse and stress us. And since we do not like blanks we fill them. In a conversation, we do small talk. On the canvas, we just fill in the blanks with a kind of small talk as well.

We just don't like blanks! by xkcd (Source http://xkcd.com/608/)

Small talk on the canvas is to just fill in something which sounds good, but has no base, no facts supporting it, not even being a smart idea. If we do not know exactly who our customers are, we wirte Business-to-Business customers or advertising in the box to communicate with our customers. B2B sounds sophisticated but for an entrepreneur who wants to build something on top of her canvas, this is useless at best, dangerous at worst.

While small talk is socially accepted and even expected, filling the blanks on the canvas is dangerous since it pretends we have solved this problem and we move on to another building block to fill. That is deadly if you really want to execute your idea into reality.

A good test is to go back to the four essential questions or a business model.

• What excites your customers?
• How do you create the value for your customers?
• How do you earn money?
• Who is on our team and why?

Try to answer these questions in one and two sentences each and test them with somebody outside your team. Does she understand you? Would a customer think: “Wow what a great idea, how can I become a customer?” Would your pitch motivate people to spent time with you and your idea?

Designing businesses is not just an exercise where you have to fill all blanks on the canvas. It is not a school exam where answering all question is a key to an A.

Designing a business is art. Designing is an endless process to gain insights, to ideate, to develop assumptions based on insights, to challenge your assumptions, getting more to the point, to test with customers and accepting that a blank can be left for some time as a blank. Having a blank on the canvas is better than to have some useless small talk on the canvas.

And this phenomenon, I have seen a lot when I work with would-be entrepreneurs regardless of their age. Fight this! Withstand small talk on the canvas! Leave blanks blank!

During the 2000s the average airline generated an EBIT margin of just 0.7%. Taken a longer perspective, the figures are as drastic. From 1970 to 2010 the airline industry generated over USD 12,000 billions of revenues in today’s prices, but only a total of USD 19 billion of net post-tax profits; a margin of only 0.1%.

Another dull figures: Around USD 500 billion of investors’ capital is tied up in the airline industry. Normally, investors would expect a return on capital of around 7-8%. Taken the 500 billion that would mean a return of 40 billion annually to cover the cost of capital. But what did the airlines earn? 20 billion or 20 billion less that the capital would have earned elsewhere. The airline industry is a big capital destroyer. Interestingly, other firms along the travel value chain like airports or computer reservation systems earned excess returns. So there is profit in the travel industry but not with the capital-intensive airlines. Airlines are a dismal industry.

So are customers at least happy? Just type in Google the search “airline experience” and enjoy all the customer stories about flights. And watch the film “United breaks Guitars” like 12 million others did on Youtube.

What went wrong and is there a solution to it? And think about it why we all hunt of low prices on traveling while we spent USD 5 for a latte at Starbucks. Why are we so price conscious on travelling and not on coffee?

Here are some thoughts I presented at the 17th international airline conference last fall in Seattle. Thanks to Nawal Taneja, Dietmar Kirchner and Rob Solomon for the kind invitation.

Thesis 1: Airlines are masters of transportation economics, not customer experiences

It seems that all airline managers are great students of economics but not of entrepreneurship and marketing. Since they have a perishable good (empty seats on an upcoming flight are like perishable goods), they believe strongly in variable pricing by exploiting the maximal price customers are willing to pay.

That sounds very reasonable at first, since who wants to argue with economists and their theoretical models, but what airlines have forgotten over time is, that if you treat customers like rational customers then you will get rational customers and extremely price sensible customers in the end.  However, there is a good reason why economics is called a dismal science. So if you follow economists, you get a dismal industry.

Thesis 2: Price differentiation across channels annoys good customers

While customers more or less have accepted that the price differs depending how early or late you book, Airlines have established a system of price differentiation for different channels. For a flight to Hamburg to Zurich I have different prices across channels but even different prices in one channel depending how the flight is labeled due to cross-sharing agreements.

To give you an example from last fall: At eBookers the same flight was 25% more expensive if it was sold under the Swiss brand alone compared to the same flight under Lufthansa and Swiss brand. Finally, the booked price was even 50% lower compared to the highest price. So what do customers think about this strange pricing across channels? At least, I lose even more trust and now I shop around for a even better price for the same flight because I know there is a better price around. So I spent to a lot of time for the feeling of not being ripped-off because I chose the wrong channel. And unfortunately, you get ripped off if you chose the wrong channel.

Thesis 3: Now, customers take revenge. The digital customer is knowledgeable

While in the past large IT systems to optimize the profit per customer (yield management) were only available to airlines, with the Internet customers have even more powerful tools to optimize their travel costs.

The systems of Google, Expedia, etc. can never be matched by the airlines. The airlines started a war on the yields with superior weapons, now the customers take revenge with systems the airlines can never beat or even match. Instead of yield management, airlines got bleeding management.

The digital customer is a knowledgeable customer due to all the information he has. So if airlines treat him still like the stupid customer of the past when he had no access the information, customers will feel even more exploit by the airlines as profit maximizers. The bad joke is that the airlines short-term profit seeking behavior is exactly the reason why there is no profit in the airline industry.

Thesis 4: Airlines have trained customer to hunt for bargains not value. That backfires

Airlines have trained their customer to look for the best price and not for value, and now the customers look via comparison engines for the best price and not value.

Airlines have conditioned their customers in the past on price, now that backfires, since customers have to be retrained about value. And as we all know, unlearning is impossible. Airlines have trained customers for a long time on price to be the sole criteria so value strategies will have serious problems to even reach the customers.

Actually, the same happened in German retailing. “Cheaper, cheaper!” was always the claim and now Germany has the cheapest food prices in Europe but also not the quality you would expect from one of the richest countries in the world.

Thesis 5: Airlines will become even more of a commodity unless they create business models that customers love

That sounds easier said then done due to all restrictions of the past (locations of hubs, contracts with unions, aging fleet, etc.) and the increasing computing power of firms like Google or Expedia.

However, airlines without the impediments will create innovative business models as the Arabic airlines like Emirates or Copa, Southwest or Ryanair did.

Copa attacked the Latin American market with fresh strategic assets (hub in Panama), making flights between Latin American countries much easier by using a hub that is closer to the markets than Miami, the classical hub. The same is true for Emirates. While they profit from deep pockets of their owner, a favorable tax regime and lower fuel prices in the region, the most important part is their hub around which 4.5bn people live within an eight-hour flight. They became the hub between Europe and Asia.

To find business model innovations, you have to question every aspect of your business model including your current hubs, your supply chain (Do you want to backward integrate into airports?), etc.

However, all the former national carriers are not as free as they need to be but the competitors do not care. So either they start to innovate in their business models or they will parish in the current form.

Thesis 6: Airlines can learn from firms that have customer value and trust build into their business model and even beating economics

Airlines should look less at their current competition but at firms that have masters beating economics. The core is to understand that your business is not a commodity – which is ruled  by the dismal science of economics – if you add value and trust into your business model.

How about having a every day low price policy like Walmart has. Therefore, the customer does not have to shop around to find a cheaper place. The same is true for Aldi. Customers trust Aldi, that they have low prices everyday therefore you do not have to shop for the next bargain.

The SBB, the federal railway in Switzerland, has an interesting pricing as an example. They have just one price to go from A to B. The ticket is valid for all rides to your destination and there are no reservations needed for your ride. You can take any train (fast, slow) to your destination, it is always the same ticket. You can take any train any time with your ticket. From an economic point of view that sounds stupid as if the managers have no idea about transportation economics. That might be true on short term, but the SBB is beloved by the Swiss since it is such a comfortable and easy-to-use transportation means that it even riding a car is even more complicated than using trains in Switzerland. In the end “stupid” managers might in deed be very clever.

Here you find the full presentation also for download:

P.S. I wrote this post on a long distance flight to and back from the US. I still enjoy flying with my favorite airlines Swiss and Lufthansa. Not because they are cheap, but reliable and of reasonable quality. That’s all I expect plus some 5 cm more legroom in the economy class since I am almost 2 meters or 6’6″ What really annoys me about both airlines that I have to check several websites (their own, ebookers and billigfluege.de to get the best price). As I have shown in the presentation, the difference for the same flight from the same airline can be up to 50%. How can I trust the corporate site, if they want to rip me off? It is not the 50 CHF that annoys me but this feeling of being “ripped-off”.

Apple has a market capitalization of 576.79 billion USD. There are 43’400’000 search results at Google when you look up Apple Business Model Innovation. Apple is the household name for innovation for sexy products and services for which people camp in front of stores to be the first to get the latest gadgets.

But it is also interesting to look at the cost associated with Apple’s success. Take a look at infographics made by mbaonline.com.

In the upcoming three next posts, I will share some insights I gained from using the business model canvas on these industries. The series will start with the pets industry.

A word of warning to all industry experts: I am not an expert for these industries. I’m not a pet industry expert. I am an expert for the process of re-thinking and re-inventing business models.

Pets Industry – A revolution in the making

The following slide deck is my presentation, I gave on January 27^th, 2012 in Berlin at the Pets International conference. Enjoy some insights in a very interesting industry where the core is all around living creatures and the close relation we have to them.

Enjoy also my new design of the business model canvas I have created together with Gottschalk & Ash, a designer with the support of the Wolfsburg AG, an innovation incubator in Germany. You will see more in the future.

Pets are man’s best and dear friends

Pets are highly emotional and men’s best friends. Pets are members of your family. Sometimes they are treated better then human beings. Pets are for companionship or pleasure and treated with care and affection. The pets industry is very different from the livestock industry where animals are seen as assets.

The pet food industry seems from the outside a cozy industry where a few big firms dominate the shelves for pet food at the largest retailers. Will this last or will we see changes to the current industry structure and the current dominant business models?

Looking as an outsider at the industry, the biggest innovation in pet food seemed to be quite far in history with the emergence of branded pet food like Pedigree, Frolic or Sheba. Pet food is branded and marketed in very similar ways as (human) consumer products. Brands are build and emotions are used to create customer awareness and loyalty. So by applying classical fast-mover-consumer-goods marketing on pet food made pet food a consumer good even when the consumer is only the buyer but not the user. The extreme form is e.g. Sheba where humanisation of pets food is at its extreme. Sheba is made for humans (smell is specially designed for the human nose) and special edition like the Chrismas edition with porcini mushroom address humans not the needs of cats.

The giants of P&G, Mars, Colgate and Nestlé control the market

So it is not a big surprise that the classical consumer goods companies like Procter & Gamble, Mars, Colgate or Nestlé excel in the market for pet food as well. According to Wikipedia, these 4 firms control 80% of the pet food industry. They transferred their marketing know-how to the pet food market. Besides their strength in production and mass marketing, their core strength lies in the power play and negotiation with the large retailers like Carefour, Sainsbury or REWE in order to obtain sufficient shelf space to present their goods.

With their large advertising budgets, the large pet food firms are able to generate the necessary pull in the channels. The large retailers prefer to work together only with a small number of supplier in order to simplify their supply chains. And only the large consumer goods companies can withstand the enormous negotiation power of the retailers since they have must-have products in their large range of products. So large retailers require and cause large pet food firms and vice versa.

This business system is well entrenched in the industry for a long time. However, one can be much smaller than the current biggies to be an efficient pet food manufacturer, so the current industry structure is the result of channel economics and not production economics. Besides the four big ones, hundreds of smaller firms deliver 1000plus varieties of accessories and specialized foods and additives.

A very innovative firm, Royal Canin, was acquired in 2002 bei Mars. Royal Canin concentrates on specialized food for different life stages (puppets, adults, senior), sizes (mini toy, mini, medium, maxi, giant) to breeds (Yorkshire Terrier, Pug, English Bulldog, Cocker Spaniel….)

Fressnapf or Qualipet: Mega stores as game changers

Innovation in the pet food industry came in the last years from the distribution side. On the one hand, retailers like Aldi or Lidl moved into their own pet food via trade brands. On the other hand, new channels emerged with mega stores like Fressnapf or Qualipet. Fressnapf alone has 1.146 shops in 12 European countries.

These mega pet stores are large enough to build their own trade brand into a trusted brand. It is not the privilege of fast-moving-consumer-goods companies anymore to have access to customers and to knowhow to build a trusted brand. The trade brands of Fressnapf or Qualipet are trusted brands in their own rights today.

The Internet as the next game changer

The mega store concept was a typically game changer in many other retail category like books, consumer electronics or sports. However, the next game changer is already well known but less understood, the Internet.

The current industry structure of the pet food industry is the result of the (physical) channels economics and not of production requirements, and the internet is changing the economics of distribution again as did the mega stores. And the changing economics demand and enables different business models.

Often, it is believed that online will be just another channel and that it will help the incumbents to optimize their business model. Of course, the Internet can help the incumbents to optimize their current business model but it also allows new business models as we have seen in the case of Amazon. Amazon started as an online book retailer and industry experts expected that Amazon would be crashed by book mega stores like Barnes & Nobel or Borders. The opposite is true. Actually, Borders is now bankrupt, not Amazon.

Where is the next Fressnapf with the right choice of my pet?

Amazon is not just another distribution channel but also ventured into book publishing and reading devices. Amazon understood early that the Internet is not just another channel but can also change the production of goods as well. You might think that is only true for information goods like books that can easily be sold digitally, but think about the production economics of pet food.

Do you have to be as big as Mars to be an efficient producer? Do you have to be a bulk producer where all dogs get the same food in the same big bags and cans? Isn’t it possible to mix efficiently an individually designed dog food in production? Can you not offer MyDog Food in a similar way as MyMuesli or MyChocolate are doing?

People want the right choice, not more choice!

Yes, the Internet allows to bring individual blended and produced pet food together with a distribution system that allows such an individual distribution and that will, over the long haul, change fundamentally the business models in the pet food industry.

Royal Canin offers today all the different kinds of pet food, but the current physical distribution system is made to handle such a choice. The broad choice in the retail outlets is a tyranny. People want the right choice not more choice.

To make a prediction, which business models will prevail, would be like looking into a crystal ball but you can prepare by understanding your current business model and by understanding where change will happen. And change will happen.

I have prepared my personal highlights and the Top 10 of post you have visited during 2011. The other Top 10s are about the search terms around my blog and the countries where all the visitors come from.

Personal Highlights

1. It is amazing how knowledge dissemination has changed over the last years thanks to the internet. Today, relevance counts more than pure marketing or brand power. A big thanks to Google that made it possible that readers find the blog. Today, knowledge disseminates from students to professor, from lower ranks to CEOs. A revolution in knowledge management.
2. Thanks to the blog and its readers, I got assignments all over the world.  This year, I loved particularly to work in Seattle, Singapur and Cairo (shortly before the revolution). Good luck to all my friends in Egypt and keep up the free and entrepreneurial spirit I felt there.
3. Thanks to all my readers and clients, 2011 was a very exciting year. 2012 will be exciting as well. I have found with with the innovation campus of the Wolfsburg AG, a public private partnership between the city of Wolfsburg and Volkswagen AG, a sponsor for a tool box for entrepreneurs. The tool box will be out by mid 2012. The tool box will be in German and is targeted at all entrepreneurs that what to make a difference in life.
4. fluidminds has launched a new product, a five day workshop for intrapreneurs in large corporations. First pilots in 2011 and more to come in 2012. It is fantastic to see how fast you can find customer insights and then develop great business and growth initiatives on top of them.