Unbundled Business Models: Arm's Focus on Ip

This is my first not-technical blog post more towards the business side which I know very little about but still worth trying. I will be discussing the “unbundled business model” and why ARM is focusing only on designing IP cores.I came across the term unbundled business model in a book called “Business model generation” by Alexander OsterWalder and Yves Pigneur. Which is a fantastic book and they really take the reader through the entire planning process of a business or business model generation. As most electronic engineers will be aware, ARM holdings which stands for Advanced RISC Machines (Acorn RISC Machines at time of foundation) is a British Intellectual Property licensing company. So basically they license their proprietary processor cores to semiconductor companies like Apple, texas instruments, Freescale, Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc. These cores are specifically popular in mobile computing because of their low power consumption characteristics. In fact almost all of the recent smart phone processors are based on an ARM core. Err I guess we are diverting to electronics again, coming back to the company. So the company has a unique business model, unlike other semiconductor companies like Intel or microchip who design and manufacture their processors. ARM is specialized in designing the barebones of the processor, the core (which technically is a bunch of hardware synthesis files containing thousands of lines of Verilog code, or any other language) and gives out this code to semiconductor companies to let them manufacture their own customized processor. Unbundling Business Models: The term “unbundled corporation” was coined by John Hagel and Marc Singer and it suggests that there are three types of businesses: Customer Relationship businesses, product innovation businesses and Infrastructure businesses. These sectors require different skill sets are separate entities of a corporation or ideally a separate business itself. The role of Customer