The Risk-Driven Business Model: Four Questions That Will Define Your Company

How to outsmart risk

Risk has been defined as the potential for losing something of value. In business, that value could be your original investment or your expected future returns.

The Risk-Driven Business Model will help you manage risk better by showing how the key choices you make in designing your business models either increase or reduce two characteristic types of risk—information risk, when you make decisions without enough information, and incentive-alignment risk, when decision makers’ incentives are at odds with the broader goals of the company. Leaders who understand how the structure of their business model affects risk have the power to create wealth, revolutionize industries, and shape a better world.

INSEAD’s Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine, noted operations and innovation professors who have consulted with dozens of companies, walk you through a business model audit to determine what key decisions get made in a business, when they get made, who makes them, and why we make the decisions we do.

By changing your company’s key decisions within this framework, you can fundamentally alter the risks that will impact your business.

This book is for entrepreneurs and executives in companies involved in dynamic industries where the locus of risk is shifting, and includes lessons from Zipcar, Blockbuster, Apple, Benetton, Kickstarter, Walmart, and dozens of other global companies.

The Risk-Driven Business Model demystifies business model risk, with clear directives aimed at improving decision making and driving your business forward.

Karan Girotra is Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD. His research has appeared in top academic journals and has been featured by the Financial Times, Businessweek, Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review. A former entrepreneur himself, Girotra continues to engage actively with start-ups, largely as an instigator, adviser, and mentor.

Serguei Netessine is the Timken Chaired Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD and the Research Director of the INSEAD-Wharton Alliance. His research has received extensive media coverage in CIO Magazine, the Economist, Forbes, and the New York Times. He consults and advises companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 corporations and US governmental agencies.