11. Business Model Innovation with Tom Bartman

06/26/16 • 19 min

The value of and necessity for an organization to innovate its business model is rarely disputed in discussions of how to best survive in today’s rapidly changing economy, yet in an odd paradox, there is no standard definition in management thinking of what a business model is (or — as our research has taught us is equally if not more important — isn’t). In this episode of the Disruptive Voice, senior researcher Tom Bartman shares with us a number of insights that can be gained about an organization and its potential to successfully innovate its business model by applying Professor Christensen’s framework to the organization’s assets and activities.

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10. American Express: Joe Costa (JD/MBA 2016) and Jeff Cui (JD/MBA 2017) — BSSE Research Paper

“It’s a funny feeling to find yourself talking about JP Morgan and calling them 'low-end', but such is the nature of disruptive innovation: as a theory of competition, the labels it employs are relative, not absolute. In the credit card industry, American Express is the undisputed incumbent, leaving JP Morgan to be labeled as the low-end disruptor with their Chase Sapphire credit card, as noted by JD/MBA students Joe Costa (2016) and Jeff Cui (2017) in their final paper for BSSE, Clay Christensen’s course at the Harvard Business School.

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12. BlackRock: Gregory Duggan and Ravi Umarji (MBA 2016) — BSSE Research Paper

Founded in 1988, BlackRock (BLK) has grown from being a provider of fixed income investment products into the preeminent global asset manager that it is today. Unlike its major competitors, BlackRock insisted on being an integrated platform and employed an acquisition strategy that we would call LBM (leverage my business model) to become a one-stop-shop for investment products. It would seem only natural, then, that BlackRock would likely employ a similar LBM-type integration in its recent acquisition of robo-advisory firm FutureAdvisor, but as 2016 MBA graduates Greg Duggan and Ravi Umarji studied this transaction through the lens of the theories of our course, BSSE, they came up with a different recommendation for the management team.