Business Model Innovation

The Firebugs in the Attic: Why Sustaining Innovation Never Delivers Business Model Innovation

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:44:00 +0200

In The Firebugs — also translated as The Fire Raisers or The Arsonists — a 1958 parable play by the Swiss writer Max Frisch, a man named Biedermann reads in his newspaper about arsonists who talk their way into people’s houses, store petrol in the attic, and burn the place down. That same evening a stranger appears at his door. Biedermann lets him in. Then a second one. They move into the attic. They roll in barrels. Biedermann sees the barrels, asks what is inside, is told it is petrol, and decides not to make a scene. In the final act he hands them the matches himself, because refusing would have been impolite.

Biedermann is not stupid. Every single one of his decisions is socially reasonable. Throwing a guest out is unpleasant. Accusing someone of arson without proof is rude. Each step is defensible. Only the sum is fatal.

I have been writing about business model innovation for seventeen years on this blog, and I have come to think this is the most accurate picture we have of what actually happens inside large companies. Not blindness. Not laziness. A long series of individually sensible decisions, each one avoiding a conflict, adding up to a catastrophe.

The guest we keep letting in is sustaining innovation.

Why business model innovation hurts

A partner at a large consultancy once put it to me like this: business model innovation always hurts, because there are no easy answers — only the realisation that the past was magnificent and is not a plan for the future.

That is the shortest version of everything below.

The reason it hurts so much is that a business model is a company’s identity, not just its profit mechanics. Questioning it does not mean saying “your processes could be better.” It means saying “the thing you are proud of no longer carries you.” You can buy an instrument without changing. You cannot buy a business model.

So the evasion into instruments is not stupidity. It is identity protection. And that makes it far harder to argue with than incompetence would be.

The rational no: Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma in one scene

There is a second reason, and Henrik Ibsen staged it in 1882. In An Enemy of the People, Dr Thomas Stockmann is the medical officer of a Norwegian town’s new public baths — the thing the town’s prosperity now rests on. He tests the water and finds it contaminated. The town does not refute him. It votes on whether he may speak, and then declares him an enemy of the people.

The mayor in that play — Stockmann’s own brother — is not corrupt. He is calculating correctly. Two years of closure and the loss of the spa guests against an invisible risk: measured by his criteria, his brother’s proposal really is the worse option.

This is Christensen’s resource dependence, dramatised. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, the customer who rejects the disruptive solution is not dumb or slow. He is rational. Measured against his criteria, the new thing genuinely is worse: lower margin, smaller volume, immature performance. And the harder version of the argument says that even if management wanted to allocate resources differently, its own best customers and its own return expectations would prevent it.

That is worth sitting with before we get indignant about anyone. The people who say no are usually right about their own numbers.

“You don’t understand our market”: the killer argument against business model innovation

Notice what the town does not do. It does not test the water.

This is the move I have seen most often and recognised most slowly. The diagnosis is not refuted. The diagnostician is reclassified. “You don’t understand our industry.” “You don’t understand our market.” “That’s academic.” It is the most economical way to dispose of an inconvenient analysis, because it costs nothing — no counter-evidence, no data, no argument. It only requires assigning the speaker to a category from which nothing binding can be said.

I have been on the receiving end of that sentence more than once, and I want to be precise about why it works. It is not censorship. Nobody is silenced. The analysis stays in the room, it is simply no longer anybody’s business. And that is enough, because a diagnosis that nobody has to act on is indistinguishable from one that was never made.

E-fuels, hydrogen and HVO100: sustaining innovation you can buy

Here is what sells instead.

Tell a manufacturer of combustion engines that e-fuels are coming — synthetic petrol made from renewable electricity, poured into the tank of a car built yesterday — and you are not selling a technology. You are selling a sentence: you may remain who you are. The piston stays. The plant stays. The supplier network stays. The competence stays. The existing fleet keeps running. Only the molecule changes.

That is why e-fuels have the political and emotional pull they do. They are the one option that requires nobody to give anything up — not the manufacturer, not the supplier, not the driver, not the region that builds engines. Everything else on the table asks somebody for a sacrifice.

Hydrogen burned directly in the cylinder makes the same promise one step down, and HVO100 makes it one step further: a drop-in fuel for engines already on the road. I have written about why a clean fuel is not a business model, so I will not repeat the argument here — only the part that matters for this post. None of these are fantasies. They work. They can also come down a learning curve. But they sit far up that curve with very few cumulative doublings behind them, while batteries have had a decade of volume doing the work. Volume is the variable, and volume is exactly what these options do not have.

None of that is the reason they sell so well. They sell because they promise change while leaving the business model untouched.

Venture clienting and ambidexterity: sustaining innovation as a process

Now move one level up, from the product to the organisation, and you find the identical construction.

Venture clienting. Ambidextrous organisation. Innovation labs. Corporate accelerators. The promise is the same: the evaluation criteria stay, the budget logic stays, the career incentives stay. Only the origin of the idea changes.

Take venture clienting, the current favourite. Gregor Gimmy coined the term at BMW in 2014 and built the first venture client unit, the BMW Startup Garage, in 2015. The idea is genuinely elegant: don’t take equity in a startup, become its customer while it is still a venture. Buy the prototype, run it in a real project, turn the first order into follow-up orders. “We are not an accelerator, we are a venture client” is how Gimmy draws the line, and he is right to draw it — this is not a demo-day operation.

I want to be careful here, because the model is better than most of what surrounds it. But read the selection criterion its own inventor states. You should only consider venture clienting when your internal solution is significantly worse or does not exist at all — not even within your network of established partners. If a startup is only marginally better, stay away.

That is a sensible rule. It is also a precise description of what the model is built to do: fill gaps in the value creation you already have. It looks for technologies your current suppliers cannot deliver, for the architecture you are currently running. The reference point is always the existing business.

Look at the case everyone uses to explain it. BMW wanted cars to drive themselves out of the factory, solved it with sensors along the track rather than in the vehicle, and did it with two startups the Startup Garage found and integrated into the purchasing system. Excellent project. Real value. And a process improvement inside the plant.

Now hold that against Christensen’s actual argument, because this is the part that gets lost. In his framework the autonomous unit does not work because it is organised autonomously. It works because it has different customers — a new market that values the immature offering precisely for the attributes the mainstream market rejects. Autonomy without its own demand is just a sheltered room.

A venture client...

The Quick-Commerce Business Model Crash: 5 Lessons Every Founder Can Learn from the $12bn Gorillas Collapse

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:21:00 +0200

In 2022, the quick-commerce business model looked unstoppable. Gorillas had turned “groceries in ten minutes” into a cultural signal and a venture-capital magnet. Its Turkish rival Getir was valued at twelve billion dollars. Four years later Getir sold what was left of its delivery business to Uber for $335 million – a ninety-seven-percent collapse. Along the way it had already bought and buried Gorillas. This is not a story about a bad idea. It is a story about one question every founder and every investor should learn to ask coldly.

The question is this: when I see customers flocking to something, am I watching a real change in customer behaviour, or am I watching capital buy the appearance of one?

The two look identical on a growth chart. They end very differently. One builds a business. The other funds a countdown. And the tools to tell them apart are the ordinary tools of business model thinking – if you use them before you scale, not after.

What actually happened to Gorillas, Getir and the ten-minute promise

The chronology is short and brutal. Gorillas, founded in Berlin in 2020, scaled at extraordinary speed on the promise of ten-minute delivery. By late 2023, weakening under capital pressure, it was absorbed by Getir, which briefly became Europe’s largest quick-commerce player. That was not a triumph. It was a rescue in a market where venture funding had collapsed as interest rates rose. In 2024 Getir pulled out of Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and the US. Then Turkey stopped being enough, and in early 2026 Uber bought the delivery business for a fraction of its former worth, folding it into Trendyol Go.

Look closely at that last move, because it gives the whole game away. Uber did not buy “ten minutes.” It bought density it could plug into a platform it already runs. The acquirer quietly corrected the value proposition on the way in.

One survivor tells the opposite story. Flink, also from Berlin, lost €515 million in 2022 and €213 million in 2023. Then it changed almost everything. In March 2026 it raised $100 million led by Prosus and confirmed it was profitable at EBITDA level. Read how its CEO talks now, and notice how little of it sounds like 2021: operational discipline, unit economics, an average basket above €45, delivery in about thirty minutes, new locations only where density and profitability actually work. Same category label. Completely different company.

So we have two futures out of one industry. The difference is not luck. It is a difference in what each firm believed it was selling, and in whether the demand it saw was ever real. I made this same paired comparison with Sony and Matsushita: same industry, opposite business models, opposite outcomes. Here the split runs along three confusions – and I will walk through them using the four elements of a business model from my book Das Richtige gründen: value proposition, value-creation architecture, revenue model, and Unternehmensgeist. Gorillas made all three confusions. Flink, the hard way, unmade them.

Confusing speed with the value proposition: why ten minutes is only an offer

In my book I insist on a distinction that sounds pedantic until it costs someone a billion dollars: the offer is not the value proposition. The offer is what you ship. The value proposition is the benefit a real, nameable human actually buys. I have written this so often it is almost a mantra on this blog – the product is not the value proposition – because it is the single most expensive mistake in business modelling.

“Ten minutes” is an offer. It is a property of your logistics, sitting inside the value-creation architecture. It is not, in itself, a benefit in anyone’s life. So ask the real question: what job is the customer hiring you for?

For a narrow set of occasions – the forgotten nappies, the run-out-of-beer-mid-party, the sudden headache with no paracetamol in the flat – the benefit is genuine and urgent: I need this now and I failed to plan for it. There, speed is the benefit, and the value proposition is real. But that is a small, occasional job. For the weekly shop nobody needs ten minutes. They need a full basket, fair prices, and delivery they can trust.

Gorillas built its entire operation around a benefit that only a fraction of grocery occasions ever demanded – and then acted surprised that baskets were tiny and orders erratic. This is the Kodak error in a new costume. Kodak got the product right, the digital camera, and the value proposition wrong: customers had stopped buying “keeping memories” and started buying “sharing memories,” and Kodak kept optimising the wrong benefit. Gorillas optimised speed while most customers were quietly buying “convenience at a price I would actually pay.”

And here is the deeper point I keep returning to: a value proposition is not a marketing term, it is your mission – it has to be delivered, consistently, by every building block of the business model. “Ten minutes” was a slogan the rest of the business model could not pay for. That is not a value proposition. That is a promise the architecture and the revenue model quietly refused to honour.

Notice, too, the language trap. Founders and investors talked about “the market” for instant delivery – and “the market” is exactly the kind of abstraction that hides the truth. I always insist on talking about customers, not markets, because customers are people: identifiable, countable, and they either buy at the real price or they don’t. “The market wants speed” funded a great many dark stores. “This named person, on this occasion, will pay the unsubsidised price for speed” would have funded far fewer – and far better ones.

Flink’s turnaround is really a value-proposition correction disguised as an operational one. A €45 basket and thirty-minute delivery is the sound of a company that finally asked what the customer buys – regular household top-up shopping – instead of what the rider does.

Confusing bought adoption with real ad...

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Weed Control: What stays the same, what changes: Business Model Innovation in Farming

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