Business Model Innovation: Seizing the white space

Video via Erwin Fielt

Seizing the white space and the importance of business model innovation, earmarked one more time after downloading (while not yet reading) a range of articles from a – freely available – special issue of Long Range Planning on business model innovation. Patrick is not exactly happy about academic practices et al.:

On the one hand it is great that academia takes up such an important topic; on the other hand, it is shows again that academia is a self-referential system which has a strong bias to  not-invented-here syndrome since most authors do not reference earlier works that were published outside their closed community of Strategy professors.

Hard to argue with him. Funny thing is that even when it’s really essential, understanding and pragmatic put-to-use is rare … well, not everyone is willing to think and act in complex models and so there’s both an implementation gap in practice and an understanding gap in general strategy research. Agree? Or am I too harsh? You say there’s a lot of movement at gap one? Like some companies are working hard to create innovation spaces for people to make things happen, they try to share and leverage knowledge, they facilitate passionate collaboration, they design their (social) business?

  1. Hoi Martin,
    thanks for citing me. And you are so right about the lack of willingness to challenge the current business model. People are great at optimizing the existing but to build the new they have to unlearn what made them successful in the past. But it is not only the managers that have to unlearn but the customers as well. Just think how much knowledge we have on the consumption process. We have to forget as consumers who we consumed in the past and build new consumer knowledge. And that is very difficult. Check also http://blog.business-model-innovation.com/2009/06/change-unlearning-and-the-business-model/ from last year.
    Patrick