In September 2013, MasterCard piloted a strategic development program called “The Art and Science of Business Modeling” for its Global Products & Solutions organization. This program leverages MasterCard’s existing social learning platform—an innovative approach to skill building and collaborative learning. Customized for MasterCard employees, the program is based on global bestseller, “Business Model Generation,” by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, inventors of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) terminology. The premise behind BMC is to “… systematically understand, design, and implement a new business model—or analyze and renovate an old one.”
Program Details
MasterCard had a specific business need that was particular to its product managers in how they design, deliver, and communicate business models to internal and external stakeholders across the value chain. The resulting “Art and Science of Business Modeling” program is a five-week virtual guided learning journey—a blend of self-paced study, team participation, and weekly live Webinars where participants work together to describe, discuss, design, challenge, invent, and pilot their own business models and value propositions on actual customer projects. The objectives are clear:
- Establish a shared language to better discuss existing and new business models.
- Learn how to design, test, and build business models and value propositions systematically.
- Align your team around clear stories of how you intend to capture and deliver value.
The structure of the five-week course also allows sufficient time for participants to revisit their work offline and for participants to meet, as part of the program requirement, with a subset of their cohort colleagues called the “Breakout Group.” The participants are asked to arrange and conduct working sessions (30 to 45 minutes long) to develop their ideas on a large format Business Model Canvas.
Results
To test the effectiveness of this program, MasterCard asked participants to rate what they thought about their working business models and understanding of how to build an effective value proposition to meet their customer and market needs. When surveying last year’s participants before and after taking the course, they reported an increase of more than 28 percent on the range of ways they could test different product and business model ideas before executing and going to market. The survey also showed the course significantly improved participants’ skills of creating better value propositions and understanding and delivering solutions that meet customer needs by 20 percent.
Since the launch of the program, MasterCard has received more than 15 global team requests to deliver custom advanced workshops to 150-plus product professionals. Results of these workshops have generated hundreds of new product ideas and reframed how MasterCard positions its products from a marketing perspective to help it secure new business in local regions. Overwhelmingly, participants reported they were able to communicate more effectively with both their business partners and their customers due to the program, an increase of almost 15 percent compared with before participating in the guided learning journey.
In January 2014, MasterCard launched globally to more than 500 product professionals and continues to drive this program into its full Product Management curriculum into 2015 and beyond.
