Tag: generative business
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Generative Business Practice: Questions from Harvard’s Digital Initiative
I got lots of feedback from the folks who participated in the HBS Digital Initiative seminar where I presented some big picture ideas about generative practices. As promised, I’m summarizing what they shared with me on the index cards we used to gather up ideas. While I was so. glad. that I asked for…
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Only Transparent AND Open Practices Generate Opportunity For Your Network
Businesses need to be both transparent and open to create opportunities for themselves and their entire network. Yet even though we know that qualities like “open” and “transparent” are preconditions for innovation, we often aren’t clear about what these terms actually mean. Sometimes people even use the terms interchangeably, as though what’s transparent and what’s open are the…
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Why Be Disruptive, When You Can Be Generative? Friday Afternoon with MakeLoveNotPorn
Some businesses aim to make money. Some businesses aim to disrupt their industries. The very best businesses aim even higher — to generate new opportunity for each and every stakeholder. It was Friday afternoon clean-up-my-office time. That ‘end of the year, has it come down to this?’-moment of reckoning. Maybe while I sort out piles and piles…
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Are All Generative Businesses a Little Naughty? The case of MakeLoveNotPorn
No startup challenges our norms about ‘appropriate business’ more than MakeLoveNotPorn. MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP) is a user-generated crowdsourced video platform that celebrates “real world sex”. MLNP is a legal, lucrative, and liberatory disruptor of the adult entertainment industry. It’s also a profoundly generative business. MLNP is generative not because it’s naughty, but because of how it’s naughty.…
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Three Design Principles for Generative Business
As I was being nudged to consider whether the term “boost” really captured the central dynamic of generative businesses, I realized that it actually only represented the very first element of what it takes to be generative. Note: Since this is more like an essay than a post, I’ve added some jumps so that you…
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What Makes Digital Tech Companies Models of Generativity?
Buffer, WordPress, AirBnB, Waze, LoveWithFood, ModCloth, Etsy— so many of the organizations I’m using as examples of generative businesses share a similar profile: They are relatively small, young, organized around a core software process or product, filled with coders and developers, and part of a specific tech community. Why is generativity such a defining part…
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5 Reasons Why Generative Businesses Are So Powerful
I’d rather help one organization become generative than help a dozen organizations become ‘great’. Why? Because one generative organization has more positive impact on the world than a whole industry of organizations that are efficient, excellent, profitable, and self-focused. For generative businesses, neither the size nor the direction of their impact is accidental. Here are…