GUEST AUTHOR BLOG: From Tweaks to Transformation by Saul Kaplan author of, "The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When The World is Changing."
Source: Amazon.com
The Business Model Innovation Factory
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 reengineering, 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.
"The Business Model Innovation Factory" is a book for all leaders who recognize that incremental change isn’t enough. It’s a book about transformation. It doesn’t matter what type or size of organization or community you lead or aspire to lead. It could be a for-profit or non-profit company, a school, or a government agency. It could be a nation, state, or city, or maybe even an on-line community. Or maybe you are one of a growing number of free agents working across projects and networks. Regardless of organization type or leadership role all leaders need to learn the art and practice of transformation to stay relevant in a changing world. The most exciting and best opportunities require entirely new business models or ways to create, deliver, and capture value. The challenge all leaders face is how to reinvent a business model while the entire organization is working hard pedaling the bicycle of the current one. The 21st century screams for transformation not tweaks. The Business Model Innovation Factory is a book for transformers.
"This is the innovator’s day. The good news is that during turbulent economic times everyone looks to innovators for new solutions."
I was inspired to write this book after spending thirty plus years as an innovation junkie with every imaginable black and blue mark that comes from being a diehard change agent. I have been a student and innovation practitioner across the public and private sector, industries, and disciplines. I have observed hundreds of organizations and thousands of innovators attempt to do transformational things and settle for doing incremental things. The patterns are clear and the need for business model innovation seems obvious. I wrote this book to share my experience and ideas on how you can create a business model innovation factory to stay relevant in a changing world.
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. The Business Model Innovation Factory is for all leaders who want to stay relevant in a changing world. It makes the case for business model innovation as the new strategic imperative, shows how organizations can reinvent themselves by doing ongoing R&D for new business models, and provides an implementation road map for all business model innovators who want to go from tweaks to transformation.
Saul Kaplan is the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory. He is the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in Providence, RI, and blogs regularly at It's Saul Connected. Follow him on Twitter at @skap5.
Email me at bullishonbooks@cnbc.com — And follow me on Twitter @BullishonBooks