Business Model Innovation Strategy

I recently completed reading the book “Business Model Innovation Strategy: Transformational Concepts and Tools for Entrepreneurial Leaders” by Raphael Amit and Christoph Zott and thought of resuming my age-old habit of writing up book reviews.

I had picked up this book to read for two reasons:
1. First, as a mentor, I generally prefer using the business models as a background framework (while sprucing it with the concepts from effectuation and the lean start-up method) when I am working with early-stage venture ideas. I felt there could be something this book could contribute additionally to my practice.
2. And second, as an academician, I have extensively studied some of the papers that Amit and Zott have been developing as a stream of literature on business models. I was curious to observe how they would stitch their years of academic work into a book that a broader audience would read.

I feel the book has done justice to the academic work on which it has built its help, and I see a lot of integration with several strands of literature from strategy, innovation, effectuation, opportunity discovery, lean, and many more. This got me to enjoy the book as an academic reader.

Wearing the practitioners’ hat, the book does a decent job of communicating the broad ideas and seems to have structured the flow well. The numerous examples are well placed in illustrating the concepts. However, I would have liked a few linkages to tools and material that would have elaborated the ideas for application. In some ways, I feel the book let go of the chance of delivering a higher value to the practitioner audience as the blue-ocean strategy had done. I guess this may have been because the practitioner variant of business models had come into the market several years ago, as the book – Business Model Generation.

Personally, for me this book has provided some useful concepts that in collate my desperate thoughts from my application during mentoring sessions, and also highlighted new ideas of how I could present some of my learning to the audience of entrepreneurs. I promise to work on this one soon.

Overall, I think if you are willing to do the hard work to connect the concepts to the application. This book is a good read. Otherwise, it leaves a wide-open space for practitioners like me to extend its application and utility into our own domain areas.

I got my copy of the book from: https://amzn.in/d/6xVSMgN

Happy Reading!