Migrating an Existing Business to a New Approach to Revenue Generation

Traditional development and commercialization models take too long, cost too much, and expose founders to excessive risk. A new approach for small technology companies to generate revenue has been proposed by Bailetti. In the new approach, the top management team of a small technology company uses a a platform to co-create value by collaborating with all the stakeholders of its development and commercialization decisions and builds trust on its work practices and market offers. The purpose of this article is to provide the lessons learned from working with a top management team of a profitable business that uses a traditional approach to development and commercialization and wishes to migrate to the new approach. The article will be useful to managers and owners of existing small companies and vendor-neutral, non-profit organizations that wish to grow their businesses. The article is organized as follows. First, a hypothetical situation of a musical band illustrates the options available to a company that wishes to increase its revenue. This example is based on our work with a local technology. Next, we describe the lessons we learned while preparing the plan to migrate the existing company to the new approach to generate revenue. The hypothetical situation is used to illustrate the lessons learned. Finally, conclusions are provided.