This post was co-authored by Angela Maiers,  founder of Choose2Matter, and originally appeared on The Huffington Post here.

Beware of random collisions with unusual suspects.

Unless, that is, you want to learn something new. In that case, seek out innovators from across every imaginable silo and listen, really listen, to their stories. New ideas, perspectives, and opportunities await in the gray areas between the unusual suspects.

It seems so obvious and yet we spend most of our time with the usual suspects in our respective silos. One of the most important silos we need to break down is the one between generations.

We keep youth off to the side while the adults talk and talk about how to improve the world. To youth, it is a lot of talk and little change. It’s ironic and sad that youth, with the biggest stake in the future, are so often seen and not heard. Think of all the areas where adults are monopolizing a conversation in which youth have the largest stake.

We should recognize that young people seek purpose and want to impact their surroundings. We should listen to and give them access to the tools they need to design the future they will inherit. Would they imagine a world they are more likely to engage in and commit to? What if we connected youth, our burgeoning innovators, with today’s most successful innovators?

Choose2Matter and the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) are doing exactly that.

Choose2Matter recently launched the Quest2Matter, which challenges students to accept that they matter and act to solve problems that break their heart. Imagine connecting these impassioned young leaders with today’s leading innovators and transformation artists.

The annual BIF Summit is the place for innovators across sectors and silos to be crazy, get inspired and collide with unexpected collaborators. During this year’s #BIF9 Summit from September 18-19, 2013, we will break down the generational silos and bring the Quest2Matter’s most inspiring young voices to join Angela on stage for one of the leading innovation conversations.

Let’s get started. Join us for #BIFQuest!

What we’ve learned from the Quest2Matter, so far, is that students are ready to stop talking and start doing. BIF is helping students get better faster by hosting an ongoing #BIFQuest tweetchat between students and BIF’s innovators to ask questions and share what works and what doesn’t.

Students! Ask specific, action-based questions (How do I do…? What have you done to…?) on Twitter to @TheBIF whenever you want. Just make sure to add #BIFQuest to your tweet.

BIF troublemakers! Let @TheBIF know if you would like to be a part of the #BIFQuest tweetchat and in what areas you think you could be most helpful and we will connect you with relevant questions.

Want to learn more?

Angela and I discuss the BIF/Choose2Matter partnership in this video.

And you can watch us along with several BIF community troublemakers including Robin Chase, Whitney Johnson, Deborah Mills-Scofield and Brian Cuban on a Huffpost Live “Tech Game Changers” segment which aired on Friday, May 17th.

To begin, we need to recognize that manufacturing isn’t an industry sector, it’s a capability with plenty of opportunity for innovation. We take industry sector definitions for granted. As if industries were clubs with exclusive admission criteria and secret handshakes only revealed to companies that agree to play by understood rules. The industrial era was defined by clearly delineated industries, making it easy to identify which sector every company was competing in. It was all so gentlemanly really, as if competition was governed, like boxing, by a code of generally accepted Marquess of Queensberry rules. Companies were all assigned a numerical Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code (now North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS) identifying which industry sector they fit in to.

Those days are over. Industries don’t work that way any more, the industrial era isn’t coming back. Is Google a manufacturer or a service provider or both? Their acquisition of Motorola Mobility and U.S. production of the Nexus Q home media player suggest Google is serious about building manufacturing capability. Is Apple a manufacturer or a service provider or both? It’s hard to tell the difference between a manufacturer and a service provider and the distinction is limiting. Today the lines are blurring. Think iPod. Apple didn’t bring the first MP3 player to the market. It changed the way we experienced music by delivering on a value proposition that bundled product (iPod) and service (iTunes). Apple didn’t view the competition as other product manufacturers. Apple is a market maker not a share-taker.

Industrial-era thinking and NAICS industry codes force companies into characterizing their business models as being either product- or service-focused. This is a false choice. Making a product doesn’t define the market a company is creating or competing in. Describing a business as a manufacturer immediately constrains business model innovation opportunities. If we want to bring back manufacturing we have to start by changing our thinking about manufacturing.

Once we realize that manufacturing is a capability we can get on with democratizing it. We can all be manufacturers. In the State of the Union Address President Obama announced his plan for a $1 billion investment to build a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation composed of fifteen advanced manufacturing hubs. To bring manufacturing back to the U.S. we don’t need fifteen hubs, we need fifteen million makers creating stuff.

It won’t be long before everyone will have access to a 3D printer. Talk about democratized manufacturing capability. Armed with a 3D printer, individual makers can create their own digital design for any imagined object or borrow a design from anywhere around the world. By simply pressing a button makers can set a 3D printer into motion rendering the physical object with layers of plastic or other material right before their eyes. What was science fiction ten years ago is reality today. It wasn’t long ago we listened to the whir of a dot-matrix printer spitting out documents from our computers, now a 3D printer renders any object we can dream up the same way. With the magic of 3D printing capability we are all manufacturers, constrained only by our imaginations.

I agree with President Obama that our national mantra should be to make more stuff. I just think the effort should be less top-down and more bottom-up. The maker movement is already in full swing. If you want to witness it first hand just go to one of the 60 community Maker Faires being held around the world in 2013. Maker Faires are all-age community gatherings of makers. They are part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new. 165,000 people attended the two flagship Maker Faires in the Bay Area and New York in 2012. If you go, prepare to be blown away by an infectious passion to make things, creativity to hack and reassemble the parts and a do-it-yourself (DIY) fire in the belly that won’t be stopped.

A maker movement is already happening across the country. Imagine if instead of looking for top down solutions in a small number of manufacturing hubs we encouraged the bottom up maker momentum emerging in every community. Less push, more pull. We can all be manufacturers.

This post originally appeared on the Fortune site here.

Most companies focus innovation efforts on new products and on driving efficiencies into current models. These are important activities, but not sufficient in the 21st century when business models don’t last as long and face disruption. This means business model innovation is the new strategic imperative. In this post I outline the top 10 reasons why businesses fail to innovate.

CEOs don’t really want a new business model

The most obvious reason companies fail at business model innovation is because CEOs don’t want to explore new business models. They are content with the current one and want everyone in the organisation focused on how to improve its performance. The clearest indication is when any discussion about emerging business models is viewed and treated solely as a competitive threat.

Business model innovation will be the next CEO’s problem

Let the next guy or gal handle it. There may be a disruptive business model on the horizon but we can beat it back, pass laws to slow it down and treat it as a niche player. Sound familiar? Today’s leaders have never had to transform their business model. Tomorrow’s leaders will. Disruptive technology is everywhere and trying to outlast it is a risky strategy. Leaving the challenge to the next CEO is not a good idea.

Product is king. Nothing else matters

The lines are blurring between product and service business models. Take the iPod. Apple didn’t bring the first MP3 player to the market. Yet, the company changed the way we experienced music by delivering on a value proposition that bundled product (iPod) and service (iTunes). Industrial era thinking forces a false choice between product or service focus. A proud product heritage can get in the way.

Information technology is only about keeping the trains moving and lowering costs

“I’m from IT and I am here to help you … ” Many companies fail because IT resources are disproportionately allocated to support legacy systems. Deploying new capabilities takes a back seat. The prevalence of enterprise systems is a barrier to business model innovation.

A change anywhere within the organisation affects every function, making it difficult to develop new capabilities, let alone an entirely new business model. Enterprise systems increase the efficiency of the current business model but can be a straightjacket-constraining business model innovation.

Cannibalisation is off the table

It’s hard enough being at war with competition, so why compete internally? When executives look at new business models they see them through the lens of the current business model and view them as competition. Organisations fail at business model innovation because they blindly take cannibalisation off the table, even if a new business model may have significant upside potential.

Nowhere near enough connecting with unusual suspects

Senior executives need to get out into the market more. When they do get out they tend to meet with the usual suspects. How can leaders expect to learn anything new if they don’t mingle with unusual suspects, people with different perspectives and experiences?

Leaders spend too much time inside echo chambers within their own companies and industries. Business model innovation is more about next practices than best practices.

Line executives hold your pay card

Who wants to volunteer to work on an exciting project to explore new business models? It’s a temporary assignment and then you will return to your functional home within the organisation. And, by the way, your performance and salary review will still be conducted by your current boss. Don’t worry, because your regular job will still be waiting when you return. How excited is anyone likely to be to work on a new disruptive business model if their career is in the hands of a boss who is vested in the current one?

Great idea, what’s the ROI?

Financial metrics to assess alternative projects reflect the cost structure and required returns to sustain and grow today’s model. New business models are likely to have very different economics and must be assessed in that context. Most new business models will be dismissed out of hand if judged by the economics and constrained by the ROI requirements of the current model.

Organisations fail at business model innovation because they apply the wrong financial lens in assessing the attractiveness and feasibility of new business models.

They shoot business model innovators, don’t they?

Organisations fail at business model innovation because they shoot their renegades. If they don’t shoot them they wear them down until they leave. Business model innovators go against the corporate grain. They see entirely new ways to create, deliver and capture value. Organisations must learn to celebrate and support people within the organization who are willing to challenge the status quo, to bring totally different perspectives on delivering value to the table and are willing to take experimental risks to explore new models.

You want to experiment in the real world, are you crazy?

Organisations fail at business model innovation because ideas never make it from the whiteboard into the real world. It’s easy to doodle a new business model concept on a whiteboard. It’s hard to know with any certainty if a new business model concept is viable in the market without testing it in the real world.

Leaders will have to overcome their resistance to exploring new business models even those that may be disruptive to the current one. It’s time to stop admiring the problems and to start exploring business model innovation as the new strategic imperative for all leaders who want to stay relevant in a changing world.

This post originally appeared on the Guardian Media Network site here.

It isn’t about Avis. It’s about Zipcar
Change your lens. It isn’t about you. Zipsters aren’t your current customers. Your business model, renting cars by the day or week, isn’t designed for Zipsters. Start by understanding their experience and view the world through the lens of Zipcar’s business model, which provides members with access by the hour to a network of shared cars. You aren’t buying a platform to improve the Avis business model. You are buying a new business model that will benefit from access to Avis capabilities. ZipCar was struggling to scale its model and Avis can help. This is about enabling more Zipsters and improving their car sharing experience.

Innovate Through A Connected Adjacency
Scaling Zipcar without suffocating its nascent business model will require both autonomy as well as access to resources and capabilities from the core. Set Zipcar up as a sand box adjacent to the core. Give it plenty of room to operate independently. The more disruptive the new model the more line-executives from the core will try to undermine its success. Autonomy doesn’t mean Zipcar should operate in isolation to the core. It’s imperative to build strong connections so that people, ideas and capabilities can flow in both directions. This tricky balance requires significant CEO involvement to run interference on what will be many inevitable conflicts and tension points.

Don’t Think Synergy, Think Enablement
Classic merger and acquisition logic relies on pro-forma financial statements with identified “synergies” to justify the acquisition price. That’s usually code for cost and headcount reductions in the acquired company made possible by forcing it to use core business platforms. Avis expects to realize $50 -$70 million in synergies from the Zipcar acquisition. It all looks good in spreadsheets but Avis core platforms are not designed to support Zipcar. It’s not just a change management challenge helping employees gain comfort with new platforms. Core capabilities often come with so many rules and procedures that the new business model dies a slow painful death by a thousand paper cuts. Don’t start from the premise of achieving synergies to achieve financial results, think of it as enabling Zipcar to scale its business model. You can’t save your way to market making.

Let Zipcar play with the parts.
Not auto parts, capabilities. Business model innovation occurs when there is freedom to combine and recombine the parts in new ways to deliver value. Don’t force core capabilities on Zipcar. Less push, more pull. Let Zipcar have access to capabilities that enable business model growth. Let them play with capabilities without all the strings attached from the core business. Avis has powerful car acquisition, fleet management and insurance capabilities that can accelerate Zipcar’s growth. For Zipcar to thrive it must be able to play with the parts to combine and recombine them in ways that deliver more value to Zipsters.

Zipsters Just Want To Be Free
Zipcar has created a culture of employees and customers that feel they’re part of a movement (no pun intended). Avis has done anything but. The last thing Avis should do is to get in the way of this winning culture. Go visit Zappos to see how Amazon has done it. Zappos has a unique culture enabling a different customer service business model than Amazon. Its culture continues to thrive post acquisition and is as crazy (smart) as ever. If you impose Avis human resource, communication, social media and many other policies from the core on Zipcar its culture and business model will atrophy. Let Zipcar access those policies and capabilities that enable it.

The leadership challenge of the 21st century is how to pedal the bicycle of your current business model while simultaneously exploring entirely new ones, even those that might disrupt the core. Ronald Nelson, Avis Budget CEO, seems to be coming around. In a conference call about the deal he said, “I’ve been somewhat dismissive of car sharing in the past but what I’ve come to realize is that car sharing is complementary to our traditional business.” Avis, you have bought yourself an opportunity to be a market maker. Zipcar is one of the best business model innovation examples out there. Please don’t mess it up.

This post originally appeared on the Fortune site here.

For many BIF storytellers, the BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit boils down to one thing: Saul.

They speak of him with reverence and a deep appreciation for the way he “gets it.” His is the governing spirit that draws them to Rhode Island for a chance to luxuriate in the space of possibility he and Team BIF creates for them every year.

Saul Kaplan, Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory and engaging host of the BIF-8 Summit, has a superior reputation as a noted facilitator of meaningful conversations about community and transformation, broadly defined. But Kaplan himself is quick to credit his BIF colleagues for consistently killing it with an incredible slate of storytellers that makes him “crazy proud” of each Summit.

When he is not scolding team BIF on Twitter for hogging the bandwidth at work (well, that was during the Olympics) or treating them to the occasional midweek Margarita, he says they are all engaging in thoughtful, extended conversations about preparation for the summit and the exciting human centered design work going on in BIF Experience Labs.

“We’re all very opinionated, so we all have very strong ideas about the work we are doing and the mix of storytellers for every Collaborative Innovation Summit,” Kaplan says.

Naturally, the mix is different every year, which keeps Kaplan just where he does his best work-on a very steep learning curve. “When the curve starts to flatten out, I know it’s time to move on,” he says.

I spent 30 years thinking about innovation through the lens of the corporation… now, for the first time, I was thinking about innovation through the lens of the community.

about innovation through the lens of the community.

But Kaplan hasn’t had to worry about that since he founded BIF in 2005. After a long career in the corporate world and a move into the public sector to spark economic development in Rhode Island, he has discovered that the steep learning curve is right under our feet, in the towns and cities where our organizations take on life.

Finding the fresh angle, he says, is a matter of reimagining not just business, but the way business inhabits its surrounding social system.

“I spent 30 years thinking about innovation through the lens of the corporation, so I had every black and blue mark imaginable trying to be a change agent,” Kaplan says. “Now, for the first time, I was thinking about innovation through the lens of the community.”

The new perspective was a “real epiphany,” Kaplan says, because it enabled him to see “all the parts on the playing field.” Gradually, Rhode Island came to represent for him a space of pure potential: “I started to see the community as a platform for entrepreneurship and innovation, and I began to think about how we could turn our community into an innovation hotspot. The work we do at BIF came from that. I think it’s the work I’ve been prepared to do my entire career, my entire life.”

Kaplan says innovation is often a matter of reassembling parts to deliver value more efficiently. And yet, while he advocates suppleness in today’s business climate, he has recently engaged in a very traditional activity with a decidedly fixed result: he has written a book-hard copy, pages, print, and cover. It’s the real deal.

“The irony of publishing a book right at the peak of disruption in the publishing industry has not escaped me,” he admits.

The book itself, The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World is Changing, may be a permanent physical artifact. But it is also one of the moving parts that now shifts into a different position in Kaplan’s innovation cosmos. He doesn’t see the book as the last word on business model experimentation. He sees it as an opportunity for discussion.

“I enjoyed, in some kind of sadistic way, the challenge of locking myself in a room and writing a book,” he says, “but I completely enjoy being out talking about it now more than I did writing it.”

Sharing stories and connections is ultimately what drives the BIF Summit. Storytellers spin their yarns, adrenalin flows through the audience, and then-the random collisions of unusual suspects begins. Kaplan insists that the event remain as unstructured as possible to protect that sacred time between stories when the collisions take off.

“We resist every temptation to over-engineer it. And when someone asks, Why isn’t the summit bigger? I say no. Intimacy is important. We’re not going to change that.”

Before each Summit, Kaplan reminds the storytellers that it’s not all about them-it’s about the magic they stir up. But when that magic happens, everyone knows the secret potion came from BIF.

My pal Saul Kaplan is a self-confessed innovation junkie. That’s all he seems to think, talk, and tweet about (with occasional detour for Boston sports teams.) He’s the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory in Providence and the proprietor of the most excellent annual conference of the same name.

Now he’s taken the wisdom he’s acquired over the years and turned it into a book about an urgent, but often overlooked, topic: Business models. In The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World is Changing (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound), Kaplan outlines a set of principles that individuals and organizations can enlist to avoid getting steamrollered by competitors who do somewhat similar things but in distinctly different ways.

Because the book is so relevant to the issues many of us confront, I asked Saul to answer a few questions for Pink Blog readers:

You start off your book by saying “The goal for all leaders is to avoid being netflixed.” Could you explain a little bit about what it means to be “netflixed”?

Being netflixed means the way you do business today is disrupted, displaced, or destroyed by a competitor who plays by an entirely new set of rules. Blockbuster was netflixed. It was stuck in a bricks and mortar business model and was obliterated by the upstart Netflix. Today all companies, even Netflix, are vulnerable to being netflixed. Business models don’t last as long as they used to. The imperative for all leaders is to experiment with new business models even the disruptive ones.

In your experience, do companies usually see disruptive innovation and underestimate it, or are companies completely blind to it? How can we become more attuned to changes ahead?

Companies fail at avoiding disruption because they are so busy pedaling the bicycle of their current business model. They leave no time or resources to design, prototype, and test new ones. Every new technology is seen as a way to make the existing business model stronger rather than enabling entirely new ones. It’s not that companies don’t see disruption on the horizon, it’s that they wrongly think they can lean against it or prevent it. Companies need sandboxes to make it safe and more manageable to play with disruptive approaches. If you don’t learn how to disrupt yourself, someone else will.

One of your key points is that business model innovation has to involve the end user or the customer. Has social media made this process easier? How do you screen out the noise?

The only way to go from tweaks to transformation is to change your lens. Instead of viewing opportunities through the lens of your business model, adopt the lens of your customer. Don’t just understand customer experience. Engage them directly in the design of new business models. Social media can unleash entirely new business models, but most companies still treat it as an extension to marketing and communication departments. It’s bigger than that. All business is social. Curation and filtering become important organizational capabilities to create more signal and less noise.

You say at one point that “products and services that meet customer needs but with small initial market potential…are discarded,” leaving a gap for competitors to rush in and fill. Given a choice, would you choose to have lots and lots of customers, or a small group of very loyal customers?

Companies always establish financial hurdles that make it difficult to experiment with new ways to meet unmet customer needs. Once competitors swoop in and get a market foothold, they inevitably come after your core customers. Given a choice, I want engaged customers. I want to deliver experiences that customers are passionate about. I would rather have a solid base of committed customers, motivated to spread the word about their experience, to build from. Far too many companies lack real engagement with their customers, leaving them vulnerable to competitors who are creating more of a movement than a company. Think Apple, Zappos and 37 Signals.

What is one thing the innovative readers of this blog could do today to get their great ideas out of their heads, off their whiteboards, and into real-world testing?

I use the technical term: “We need to try more stuff!” My mantra is, think big, start small and scale fast. Somewhere along the way we’ve become afraid of trying. We don’t like to fail. I don’t know how you learn anything new if you don’t experiment all the time. We should reframe failure as intentional iteration! We have to reinvent ourselves several times over the course of our lives and careers. The goal is to get better faster. We also need to learn how to think and act more horizontally. We need to get out of our silos. I like to say we need to enable more random collisions of unusual suspects. The gold and best value creating opportunities are in the gray areas between us.

This post appeared on the Fortune Magazine site here and is adapted from my new book, The Business Model Innovation Factory.

Is it worth daring to be great? No buzzwords, no ambiguity, just a simple question that couldn’t matter more.  Business model innovation starts by realizing you are contributing to a movement that is bigger than you. It’s global, self-organizing, and transformative. Lead by letting go. The first and most important step in the business model innovation process requires a change in perspective for both you and your organization. Looking through the lens of your current business model will most likely result in incremental changes at best. Business model innovation requires a different perspective. It requires a different set of lenses to examine new opportunities. It starts by realizing transformational opportunities are bigger than you and your organization. Business model innovation must be treated like an epoch journey with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a young child exploring new territory for the first time.

Business model innovation must be a strategic objective or it won’t happen. One of my biggest pet peeves is setting strategy one tactic at a time. It drives me crazy to be surrounded by people and organizations that think if they just work hard enough and do more things that a strategic direction and destination will emerge. It seems that most of the world works this way. It is terribly inefficient. How many people and organizations do you know that pedal the bicycle like crazy but never seem to arrive anywhere. They just keep pedaling harder hoping that something will eventually stick. It is exhausting watching them. Why not establish business model innovation as a strategic objective, a specific destination, and work hard on those things that help you get there. It seems so simple. Setting a strategic direction provides a way to know which tactics are aligned and contribute to reaching the destination. The destination may change along the way requiring different tactics, and that is OK, but not having a destination at all is a ticket to nowhere.

When John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon” in 1961, Americans rallied around the destination. We believed it was possible and the goal of setting foot on the moon rallied a country to advance its global science and technology leadership. It was cool to study math and science and clear that innovation was the economic engine that would drive American prosperity. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon eight years later and said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, we celebrated his achievement as if it was our own and knew at that moment that anything was possible. We have been trying to get that feeling back ever since. Today, we have no clear destination, in space or on earth.

Business model innovation is an epoch journey and requires daring to be great. Keith Yamashita, Chairman of SYPartners and one of the most thoughtful and influential strategy consultants I know, asked the question that still haunts and compels me at one of BIF’s annual Collaborative Innovation Summits that brings together innovation junkies from around the world to share personal transformation stories. (Check out BIF-8 taking place in Providence, RI on September 19-20.) Keith asked the question, is it worth daring to be great? No

consulting buzzwords, no ambiguity, just a simple question for all of us to ponder. Implied within Keith’s question is the presumption we can all be great. We just have to dare to do it. Greatness isn’t something conferred or willed by others. It isn’t an entitlement or an inheritance. Greatness is innate and waiting for us to dare to achieve it. Keith rightly suggests greatness isn’t a deficit that you have to fill. We unlearn greatness. We permit “the system” to suppress greatness. We start to believe what other people say about us as being true about us. Kids don’t start out that way. Kids are innately and wonderfully curious about the world around them until sadly society wears the enthusiasm and opportunity for greatness down. All kids start great.

I’m reminded of Michelangelo saying, “every block of stone has a statue inside and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”. The same is true for people and organizations. Each is born with an incredible sculpture inside. We all have greatness within us and it’s our opportunity and responsibility to discover it. We must be our own sculptors and not wait or depend on being sculpted by others. If we’re waiting for permission to be great we will be waiting a very long time. Compelling sculptures are born of self-exploration and personal passion. Greatness comes from within. It’s not up to parents, teachers, friends, and bosses to do the sculpting but to encourage us, create the conditions, and provide the tools for self-sculpting.

Greatness comes from within and starts with the lighting of a fire. So back to Keith Yamashita’s question, is it worth daring to be great? Only you can answer the question for yourself and your organization. For this blessed and inspired innovation junkie my answer is, I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t dare to at least try.

Sometimes tweaks aren’t enough. Sometimes nothing short of reinventing yourself, your organization, or your community is called for. The start of the 21st century is one of those times. If anything is certain about the new millennium it’s the pace of change. New technology relentlessly hurdles into our lives. Ideas and practices travel around the world at Internet speed. Social media enables individuals to self organize and reorganize in ways unimaginable in the 20th century. We also live in anxious times marked by economic uncertainty but one thing is clear, relevancy is more fleeting than ever. How to stay relevant in a changing and uncertain world is one of the most important questions of our time.

Thriving in the midst of today’s frenetic pace of change requires a new set of approaches and tools. Incremental change may have been enough at the end of an industrial era marked by me-too products and services, process re-engineering, best practices, benchmarks, and continuous improvement. We have built institutions that are far better at share taking than at market making. We have become really good at tweaks. There are tons of books, experts, and tools to help us make marginal improvements in the way things work today and to fight it out with existing competitors for one more share point. But how do we become market makers? Incremental change may be necessary but it isn’t sufficient for the 21st century defined by next practices, disruptive technologies, market making, and transformation.

In the face of a serious disruptive threat most leaders do what they are comfortable with and know how to do, they strengthen and become even more entrenched in their current business models. They add new products and services to the current model. They deploy technology to strengthen current capabilities. They extend the current business model into new markets. And they try to create favorable laws and go to court to block new business models. These strategies may create value in the short-term but none of these efforts to strengthen existing business models are effective for long in the face of a disruptive competitor that is changing the way value is created, delivered, and captured through an entirely new business model. Disruption is now the norm instead of the exception.

Leaders could get away with blindly focusing on a single business model in the 20th century when business models rarely changed. Most industrial era leaders never had to change their business model. One model worked throughout their entire careers. They could focus on improving their market position and competitiveness by making incremental improvements to the existing model. Disruptive threats were rare and could be safely ignored. Not so in the 21st century when the half-life or longevity of a business model is decreasing. Business models just don’t last as long as they used to. New players are rapidly emerging, enabled by disruptive technology, refusing to play by industrial era rules. Business model innovators aren’t constrained by existing business models. Business model innovation is becoming the new strategic imperative for all organization leaders. But how do you transform a business model while still living in the current one?

Transformation is hard. We have to make it easier by creating the conditions for ongoing experimentation. It’s easy to sketch a new business model on the whiteboard. It’s much harder to take the concept off of the whiteboard and put it in to the real world. We spend far too much time thinking and planning and nowhere near enough time experimenting in the real world to see what works. We need to try more stuff. We can’t possible know if a new business model idea will work sitting in a conference room. We have to create the conditions in the real world where we can do R&D for new business models. If we want to stay relevant in the 21st century we have to experiment all the time. Leading organizations will have several business model experiments going on at all times.

The real trick is creating a business model innovation factory where technologies and capabilities can be remixed in new combinations to deliver value. The imperative is to do R&D for new business models. Not just concepts on a whiteboard or in a consulting deck but R&D in the real world to explore the viability of a new business model in real market conditions. Not just tweaks of the current business model but entirely new ways to create, deliver, and capture value. Organizations need a business model innovation factory to explore new business models unconstrained by the current one.

It’s a great time to be a business model innovator. This is the innovator’s day. The good news is that during turbulent economic times everyone looks to innovators for new solutions. The bad news is that we have turned innovation into a buzzword. Everyone is an innovator and everything is an innovation. And of course when that happens no one and nothing is. We have to get below the buzzwords.

Collaborators are everywhere. You will find them in the gray areas between silos. Just look up from your current business model. Seek out difference and gather often across boundaries, disciplines, and sectors. Be open and be curious. Beware of random collisions with unusual suspects. Unless, of course, if you want to learn something new. In that case seek out innovators from across every imaginable silo and listen, really listen, to their stories. New ideas, perspectives, and the value creating opportunities are in the gray areas between the unusual suspects. And yet we spend most of our time with the usual suspects in our respective silos. We need to get out of our silos more.

It is human nature to surround ourselves with people who are exactly like us. We connect and spend time with people who share a common world-view, look the same, enjoy the same activities, and speak the same language. We join clubs to be with others like us. The club most worth belonging to is the non-club club. The most valuable tribe is a tribe of unusual suspects who can challenge your world-view, expose you to new ideas, and teach you something new. A tribe of unusual suspects can change the world if it is connected in purposeful ways.

It is easy to see the potential from enabling random collisions of unusual suspects. Just check out any social media platform.

Social media is a hotspot for random collisions. You don’t need to hang out in these virtual places long to know they are populated with very unusual suspects. Interstitial spaces are ubiquitous and magic happens every day. We can bring this magic into our organizations, meetings, and gatherings. We just have to resist the normal tendency to hang out with the usual suspects. Most of the conferences and meetings we go to are teeming with usual suspects who love to get together to admire the problem. We sure do love to admire problems. Solution discussions are narrow and tend to shop around old solutions that have been discussed forever. If you want new ideas, approaches, and solutions go to gatherings that you have absolutely no reason to attend other than you might learn something new or meet somebody with a different perspective and experience. Make it a personal goal to attend gatherings where you don’t know the people or subject matter. Or better yet go to gatherings that are designed to bring unusual suspects together and to enable random collisions.

The goal is to get better faster. If you want to get better faster hang out in interstitial spaces. Don’t just dip your toes into interstitial spaces but jump in with all the passion you can ignite. Magic happens in the interstitial space between us. Maybe we could change the conversation if we connect more unusual suspects in purposeful ways. Maybe then we can make progress on transforming business models and social systems. Business model innovation takes cross-silo collaboration and breaking down the boundaries between industries, sectors, and disciplines. In constant heads down mode business model innovation isn’t possible. Transformative business models are only possible if organizations learn how to experiment with new approaches that cut across protected silos. We need to think and act more horizontally.

We live and work in a networked world complete with mega bandwidth and social media platforms to help us collide with more unusual suspects if we just look up from our silos. These new connections can help us to design, prototype and test new business models. It is time to try more stuff and take advantage of the disruptive innovation potential of all the technology we have within reach. We have more technology available to us than we know how to absorb. It isn’t technology that gets in our way. It is our fault. Humans, and the organizations and silos we live in, are both stubbornly resistant to change. If we are receptive we can learn from innovators especially the ones you will only find if you look in unusual places.

Business model innovators are all around us. They are taking advantage of today’s technologies and creating new ways to deliver value. We can learn from them if we look up from our silos. Sometimes the most inspiring innovators are in places we would never have thought to look. Or perhaps we just don’t notice them because we are so focused on our current business models and industries.

Believe in the power of design. Through it, we will chart the landscape of possibility – designing, testing and prototyping new terrain. Be a market maker rather than a share taker.

Business model innovators are always seeking out places and events with a strong design vibe. They love to hang around really smart design thinkers and the places they hang out in hopes that some of it will rub off. I am convinced that design thinking and process is a key enabler of business model innovation so I have been hanging out with lots of design types. If you hang around enough designers you immediately get pulled into their active conversation about design’s place in the innovation narrative. After participating in many of these conversations I am left with a strong sense that the design community needs to move on from the incessant argument over the importance of design thinking and process. It is time to claim victory. Get over it. The argument is boring. Design is important. We stipulate that design is about more than sexy products. We get that design is about delivering a compelling customer experience. We know that business model innovation is fundamentally about designing new ways to create, deliver and capture value. Now, can we get on with putting design thinking and process to work to enable business model innovation?

No more books are needed to convince us that design thinking and process are a priority. They are important tools. If you want to convince us, stop talking about design thinking, and start putting it to work to mobilize new business models, transform customer experiences and enable real systems change. Business model innovation requires a strong design vibe that leads to trying more stuff and putting the tools to work rather than the navel gazing of today’s design thinking debate. It is time to move the design conversation to a new, actionable, place.

We need more mad designers focused on customer experience and business model innovation. If you don’t have design talent in your organization doing more than product and website design you are making a mistake. Whether you are interested in business model innovation or not you should be leveraging design thinking and process to improve your customer experience. It is a requirement for business model innovation. In fact, maybe we need to bang together the heads of mad scientists and mad designers.

If we are waiting for lengthy business plans with detailed financial analysis and randomized double blind studies to tell us if a new business model is viable we will be waiting a very long time. That is not how business model innovation works. It takes passionate exploration, which is more iterative than traditional scientific methodology. It takes design thinking and process combined with powerful storytelling to create novel business models. We need to try more stuff and design thinking and process can help.

I am reminded of a recent innovation talk I was asked to give at a conference on the business of aging. It was a great event attended by many innovators from across the public and private sector. Attendees all shared a passion for focusing innovation on the opportunity emerging as the silver tsunami of an aging global population rapidly approaches. I shared my point of view on the need to do R&D for new business models and systems and our work at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) where we have an Elder Experience Lab to do real world experimentation for new business models and systems to transform the elder experience. As I always do, I blathered on about design and storytelling tools as the key enablers to system change, in this case developing age friendly environments and communities.

The reaction was largely positive but during a panel discussion I was reminded that many are still stuck on a perceived conflict between design thinking and analytical thinking, between design process and scientific method. They are not mutually exclusive. We need to apply our opposable minds to borrow from both approaches to design new systems while measuring what works and is most likely to scale.

It is odd for me to represent design thinking and process in the debate when my education and training is as a scientist and MBA. The reason I hang around so many smart designers is that I don’t think the old tricks alone will enable the business model innovation and system change we need. We need to borrow from both approaches to pave a new way. It is messy but necessary. Lets bring together the mad scientists and mad designers and see what happens.