Later this month Mark W. Johnson’s book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, will be officially published (although you can get the book now from Amazon). To celebrate the publication of the book and to start what we hope will be an ongoing discussion about business model innovation, this issue includes several articles on the subject.
In “The Time Has Come For Business Model Innovation,” Mark explains how business model innovation relates to disruptive innovation and why it’s so important. Here is an excerpt:
Q: In your book, you say “disruptive innovation and business model innovation are opposite sides of the same coin.” How did you get started thinking this way, and why is it important?
A: We start with the work of disruptive innovation, which says that when you get into a new market that offers an opportunity for new growth, you should come in with a simpler, low-cost approach. This way you can offer products or services the incumbent’s not going to be motivated to match, because it’s either too small a market, the margins aren’t interesting, or it doesn’t further the company goals. Now, why doesn’t the incumbent go after the entrant who does something disruptive?
His articles “A New Framework for Business Model Innovation” and “When Should You Innovate Your Business Model?” drill down further into aspects of his business model framework.
Finally, his “Why Systems Thinking, Rather Than New Technologies, Will Jump-Start the Clean-Tech Economy” discusses the type of business model innovation that will be needed as the energy industry transforms. Here is an excerpt:
Whether they focus on wind power, solar power, clean coal, geothermal, biofuels, or something even more exotic, most efforts to wean the world economy from its dependence on oil view the challenge in technological terms. And the bulk of both public and private-sector investments have been made in companies using conventional business models aimed at fitting clean technologies into existing systems. Sadly, history shows that this rarely works.
Read Strategy & Innovation articles here.
