Business Model Innovation

Even things as important as cash flow, profit, growth, continuous improvement, and innovation can become tiresome if just harped on. Even the concept of maintaining balance can become monotonous.

Whether or not we have a psychological need for cycles, they are everywhere. Fashions come and go because sameness is stifling, variety being the spice of life. Vicissitudes keep us on our toes. Nature, replete with cycles, always exhibits natural tensions, ever present opposition in all things, ebbs and flows in various forms, all giving rise to opportunities. So it is with markets and economies.

Maintaining, if not improving, market and business health and well being is a practical necessity of business life, to survive, much less grow through the many life cycles of business. Choices to follow a product or business life cycle without innovation lead to business failure, death or recycling. Innovation is creation of a new cycle, a new wave, new growth potential. Many innovations fail, but no innovation, like no seeds and no cultivation, yields no harvest.

Compared to product and service life cycles studied in the world of marketing, the cycles of all the other elements of a company's business model are less familiar, but no less real. Contracts make an attempt to counter some cycles, but ultimately cyclic pressures, like all market forces, will be manifest in some way, like all laws of nature.

Business survival in hard times, much less actually thriving, requires business model innovations that produce more cash flow and profit improvement, the life force, life blood, of business. Pricing is often paramount, but any of the factors in the equation, any of the ingredients in the recipe, any of the elements of the business model can be problematic, and therefore opportunity-laden.

And business model innovation doesn't have to be as radical as Google, WalMart, wireless communications or online stores. Sometimes seemingly minor tweaks can open doors to exciting new horizons. The key is to open minds to see a bigger picture of possibilities and fail fast in figuring out what's going to fly.

Times of economic upheaval can give rise to business model innovation as leaders within interdependent engines of private enterprise interact and adapt to meet needs. Uncertainty is inhibiting, but optimistic team-leading visionaries who initiate experimentation can discover new solutions that add value and accrue benefits to all participants and the greater whole.

"Every success I know has been reached because the person was able to analyze defeat and actually profit by it in the next undertaking." (William Marston)