Business Models: Creating New Markets and Societal Wealth

This thought piece proposes a framework for addressing the challenges of poverty and human suffering so widespread around the world. Based on the WSWP action research program, we suggest that visionary businesses can play a role in creating new business models that open up new markets, and simultaneously attend to societal wealth improvements. This framework should be of great interest to global firms intent on creating new markets for their own futures. One of the critical problems managers face in opening up new markets is to maintain fiduciary responsibility in the face of little, if any, market information. We consider such environments to be characterized by significantly high - or near-Knightian - uncertainty, and propose a framework for designing business models that simultaneously attend to the planning and project evaluation concerns of such firms, as well as the societal needs of the activity's proposed beneficiaries. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.