Reprint: R1410F
Businesses constantly innovate to create new value—but unless they also focus on how they capture value, they won’t realize maximum benefit from their breakthroughs. And even avid innovators often have a blind spot when it comes to value capture. Managers need to think about value capture more imaginatively and as a matter of course. A new framework developed by IMD business school’s Stefan Michel can help them do so.
Sometimes the only thing that can save a business is a new way to capture value.
Michel details 15 value-capture innovations, which fall under five broad categories. Firms can profit by changing the price-setting mechanism (think of Priceline), the payer (media businesses where advertisers subsidize content consumption), the price carrier (Netflix), the timing of the exchange (commodities futures), or the segment served (grocery coupons, which “fence off” customers who prioritize savings).
The practical applications of the framework are proven: In workshops at a major airline and a global professional services firm, for instance, cross-functional teams using this tool quickly devised new ways to capture value that boosted their company’s profits.
When Switzerland-based Vestergaard introduced its LifeStraw technology, it proved it could innovate. LifeStraws remove 99.99999% of bacteria and 99.9% of protozoan cysts from contaminated water. The product is a favorite of aid organizations: Over the past decade, LifeStraws have been distributed after almost every disaster.
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