Sean Horgan

Strangling innovation and non-profits

Steve Blank gets a lot right in this post about innovation:

⁠

https://medium.com/@sgblank/how-companies-strangle-innovation-and-how-you-can-get-it-right-854e6d13c7f0⁠

Concepts like

Jobs to be done⁠

McKinsey Three Horizons Model⁠

Lean Canvas⁠

, and (not covered)

Topographic Intelligence in Business⁠

and

Good Strategy Bad Strategy⁠

, form the basis for how I approach problems.

I’ve used many of these principles and processes in leading product and teams in the for-profit and non-profit world. I’ve been thinking about product in the context of non-profit mission-driven organizations, e.g.

Greater Boston Veterans Collaborative⁠

(veteran service),

Team Rubicon⁠

(disaster response), and

Veterans For American Ideals⁠

(human rights). Steve posted a variation of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) that is focused on a government or

mission model⁠

⁠

Steve made five changes to the BMC:

Revenue => Mission Achievement

Customer Segments => Beneficiaries

Cost Structure => Mission Cost/Budget

Channel => Deployment

Customer Relationships => Buy-in/Support

Below are some raw thoughts on some of these changes. I’d rather have some concrete recommendations to make this better and as those come together I’ll update this post.

The change from revenue to mission makes sense for organizations where funding isn’t a major concern but for smaller-stage non-profits, you quickly need to attract and retain funders. I also think that if you don’t focus on the flow of money, regardless of for-profit or non-profit motives, you’re going to miss something important.

Transitioning from customer segments to beneficiaries doesn’t address one of the core problems I have with BMC: multi-sided marketplaces that often dominate enterprise value chains. He tries to tackle this with a separate Value Proposition Canvas for each beneficiary but in my experience I’ve found separate BMCs/Lean Canvases to be better. I have the same issue with Buy-in/Support and I prefer the customer frame.

I’m going to dig into other non-profit business visualization tools like

this⁠

and try to find a better way to respect both the social value creation and the realistic financial needs of any non-profit.

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