Prime Movers: Define Your Business or Have Someone Define it Against You

by Rafael Ramírez, Johan Wallin

Overview

This book deals with the frameworks between customers and suppliers. These frameworks link a customer's own value creating activities to the competencies and resources of the supplying firm(s). Both the short term (financial) and long term (knowledge) benefits to using this approach are discussed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780471899440
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	06/15/2000
Series:	The University of Arkansas Lecture Notes in the Mathematical Sciences
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.24(w) x 9.31(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Rafael Ramírez is currently Professor of Management at HEC, the leading French business school. Dr Ramírez, who holds a PhD from the Wharton School, has extensive consulting experience, working with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Nissan Europe, Shell International, Rockwool, Telespazio, Wärtsilä -NSD, and Sonera. He was the Managing Director of SMG France prior to joining HEC. Dr. Ramírez co-authored the Harvard Business Review lead article From Value Chain to Value Constellation, which was elected one of the ten most requested strategy reprints by the Review's readers. The follow-up book on value constellations, Designing Interactive Strategy, which he wrote with Richard Normann, has been widely translated. In 1998 he was elected 'individual member' of the Global Business Network.

Johan Wallin is managing partner of SMG Consulting, one of three divisions of Sifo Group, a leading Nordic professional organization with activities in media intelligence, market research and management consulting. He had extensive international managerial experience prior to joining SMG. His consulting clients include companies such as ABB, Canon, Cultor, Merita-Nordbanken, Metsä-Serla, Nat West, Nokia, Scandinavian Airlines, Sonera, Tamrock, Telespazio, Telia, Tetra Pak and TietoEnator. In helping corporations implement new business models he has pioneered several initiatives to bridge the strategy and IT communities. He founded The Data Warehousing Institute Europe in 1997. Wallin has a masters degree from the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki and has a doctorate from the Helsinki University of Technology.

Table of Contents

The New Logic of Value Creation.

Configuration and Reconfiguration.

The Perception of Value.

An Emerging Architecture for Value Creation.

Customer Orientation: Aligning the Value-Creation Logics of the Firm with the Value-Creation Logics of Existing Customers.

Capability Focus and Lean Management: Leveraging the Existing Capabilities of the Firm to Create New Offerings.

Actor-Centered Market Making: Leveraging New Capabilities of the Firm to Create New Offerings.

Co-operative Market Making: Prime Movers Acting for Others, Not Themselves.

Appreciative Market Making: When Becoming a Prime Mover is Not the Driving Goal.

Value Creation as Prime Movers See It.

Notes.

References and Further Reading.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

This book sets up a framework for businesses to define their strategies and find competitive advantage in their fields. Ramirez (management, HEC, France) and Wallin, a managing partner at a market research and consulting firm in Northern Europe, define the role of business as "to identify, access, and package its capabilities into offerings that help customers create value for themselves and their counterparts." They discuss four business models, using the Prime Mover as the example of the most successful business models using case studies of companies such as Nokia, VISA, Xerox, and Caterpillar. One chapter, however, is dedicated to "appreciative market making," when becoming a "Prime Mover" is not the primary goal. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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