Jeffrey Towson

In Part 1, I summarized my list of digital business model types. For Web2: Linear business models (i.e., pipelines) Production Ecosystems Consumption Ecosystems Company Ecosystems Platforms Pipeline plus Platform Business Model For Web3 (and Web1): Protocol networks (i.e., blockchains) as stand-alone businesses Platform-protocol hybrids Protocol ecosystems (i.e., building blocks) Which I showed in this graphic. […]

I have described digital business models as either pipelines or platforms. That’s a standard distinction. In a pipeline, a firm creates value with a linear process (similar to a pipeline), where inputs are turned into something more valuable for the customer. You concentrate assets and activities in a linear sequence internally to achieve this. A

I have long argued that there is an escalating “arms race” for online demand and attention. And this is a natural result of our age of abundance. There are now more and more products, services and content than consumers could ever consume. And it keeps increasing. But there is a limited amount of consumer time,

I have a weakness for strategy. For business models and structures that create advantages for certain companies. I like to look at businesses pretty much like engineering problems. A plane is faster than a car. As a result, I underestimate the operations part. That certain businesses are just better at operating performance than others. They

I spend a lot of time in China meeting with tech companies (ByteDance, Baidu, iQiyi, JD, Alibaba, Ant and others). And one of the topics that keeps coming up is how certain companies just operate differently. They are more agile. They innovate and adapt faster. They are clearly much more effective in terms of their

One of my favorite articles about platform strategy is a 2020 article by the Boston Consulting Group. It was a really solid investigation of an important question: Why do platform business models fail? Just about any client I talk to about digital strategy and transformation wants to build a platform. Especially retailers who want to add a

I got the opportunity to sit down with Lazada Group CEO James Dong. That was a real pleasure. In this article, I’ll talk about my big take-aways. But first, a few comments on ecommerce in Southeast Asia. Ecommerce in Southeast Asia is Awesome There are a couple of places in the business world where things

In Part 1, I teed up a couple of related digital concepts: Personalization. A good example of this is Shein. They are taking personalization further up the supply chain to product development. This, in theory, can become the “market of one”. Economies of Scope (vs. Scale). Good examples here are Unilever and Sony. Improving the

I was recently giving a talk in Shanghai about the digitization of manufacturing. And how this is creating a data ecosystem that connects consumers, retailers, logistics, and manufacturing. Like this. This is something that Alibaba has been focused on with New Manufacturing. Their Xunxi smart manufacturing project is about being able to respond in real

In 2020, I traveled to Shenzhen to interview Huawei rotating Chairman Guo Ping. Not only was he one of the key decision-makers for the company, but he was also Huawei’s 5th employee. So I thought he would be the perfect person to ask both about Huawei’s early days and the how they have navigated so