By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 31, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET 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.
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Saul Kaplan: Random Collision Theory of Innovation
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 17, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET During my six years as an accidental bureaucrat, after spending twenty-five years in the private sector, my friends often wondered how I could do it. They routinely asked versions of the question: doesn’t government move too slowly for you? My standard reply was that, yes, the public sector moves slowly – but then, big companies don’t move so quickly either. And come to think of it, I teased my friends in higher education, colleges and universities move more slowly than either business or government! The point is, all institutions move slowly.
What surprised me wasn’t how slowly the different institutions moved, but the different language, behavior, secret handshakes, and views of each other I found across sectors. Xenophobia runs rampant within public, private, non-profit, and for-profit silos. Each silo has created its own world completely foreign to inhabitants from other sectors. Visiting emissaries are always viewed with skepticism. (”I’m from the government and I’m here to help …”)
One epiphany from my immersion into the non-private sector is how strenuously social sector organizations resist the notion they have a “business model”. Non-profits, government agencies, social enterprises, schools, and NGOs consistently proclaim that they aren’t businesses, and therefore business rules don’t apply.
Well, I’m sorry to break the news, but if an organization has a viable way to create, deliver, and capture value, it has a business model. It doesn’t matter whether an organization is in the public or private sector. It doesn’t matter if it’s a non-profit or a for-profit enterprise. Allorganizations have a business model. Non-profit corporations may not be providing a financial return to investors or owners, but they still capture value to finance activities with contributions, grants, and service revenue. Social enterprises may be mission-driven, focused on delivering social impact versus a financial return on investment, but they still need a sustainable model to scale. Government agencies are financed by taxes, fees, and service revenue, but are still accountable to deliver citizen value at scale.
The idea that business models are just for business is just wrong. Any organization that wants to be relevant, to deliver value at scale, and to sustain itself must clearly articulate and evolve its business model. And if an organization doesn’t have a sustainable business model, its days are numbered.
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Saul Kaplan: Business Models Aren’t Just For Business
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 3, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET I am proud of my bona fides on supporting the advancement of women. It angers me to think how slow executive suites and boardrooms are to welcome more qualified females. Stubborn gender wage gaps for comparable work are unacceptable and must be closed.
However, with all of the attention and focus on supporting equal opportunities for women, we have taken our eyes off an alarming trend. Young men in the US are in trouble by any measure of educational attainment. It’s a big deal and, for reasons of political correctness, we aren’t talking enough about this growing national problem.
I refuse to believe the support of young American’s progress is a zero-sum game – that somehow if we call attention to the problem and take a different approach to improve the experience and outcomes of boys it would come at the expense of celebrating and enabling continued advancement of girls. We can and must recognize the unique challenges of young men and we had better start doing something about it now.
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Saul Kaplan: Plight of Young Males
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 26, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET The nuclear industry measures how long a radioactive material will retain its potency by its half-life — the time it takes for the material to lose half of its radioactivity. The half-life of Uranium-235 is 700 million years, for example. During the industrial era the half-life of a business model was typically measured in generations. Once the basic rules for how a company creates, delivers, and captures value were established, they became etched in stone, fortified by functional silos and sustained by reinforcing company cultures.Those days are over. The industrial era is not coming back. The half-life of a business model is declining. Today’s leaders are either going to learn how to change their business models while pedaling the bicycle of the current one or they are going to be “netflixed.”
If netflix isn’t a verb it should be.
net-flix
1. to cause disruption or turmoil to an existing business model
2. to destroy a previously successful business model
3. to displace the way value is currently created, delivered, and captured
 Blockbuster started out with a compelling business model. Its value proposition was clear, enabling consumers to watch hit movies in the comfort of their homes. Blockbuster established an extensive value delivery network with stores conveniently located on every corner. Its first store opened in 1985 and it quickly grew to have over 5,000 retail outlets and 60,000 employees. It also had a smart financing model to capture value. It rented hit movies at a price consumers found attractive relative to the price of going out to the movies. Instead of paying a large upfront fee to buy videos from the studio (up to $65 per video) Blockbusters entered into a revenue sharing model with the movie studios including little to no upfront costs per video which gave them a huge advantage fueling explosive growth. Blockbuster started out on a roll. At its peak in 2002 Blockbuster’s market cap rose to $5 billion. In 2010 in filed for bankruptcy. So what happened? Blockbuster was netflixed.
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Saul Kaplan: How Not To Get “Netflixed”
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET 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.
Saul Kaplan 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.
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Saul Kaplan: The Hardest Question Any Leader Can Ask
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 12, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET We are proud to introduce our latest “reinvention” expert: Saul Kaplan. Saul is a nationally-recognized recognized expert on entrepreneurship and is the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory and founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory. Saul’s column will be dedicated to advising members of the RP Nation who are in the midst of, or are considering, a second (or third, or fourth) act as an entrepreneur. Enjoy and learn:
Learn by doing. Constantly test new ideas. Learn, share and repeat. The world is ever changing — stay ahead of the curve. Embrace the art of discovery.
We need to try more stuff. Innovation is never about silver bullets. It’s about experimentation and doing whatever it takes, even if it means trying 1,000 things, to deliver value. Business model innovation requires a lot more experimentation than we are comfortable with today. Tweaking existing business models won’t work. Technology as a sustaining innovation may improve the efficiency of current business models but will not result in the transformation that we all want and need. We need to learn how to leverage technology for disruptive innovation and to experiment with new business models.
Geoffrey Canada, the inspiring founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone in NYC, reminds us of the importance of constant experimentation. Everyone wants to know the one thing that makes a program like Harlem Children’s Zone successful. What is the silver bullet that will allow the program to be replicated with ease across the country? We are always looking for an easy answer. There is no silver bullet and it is not easy to transform any business model or social system. According to Canada, at Harlem Children’s Zone it is doing 1,000 things with passion to help those children succeed. It is about focusing on the customer, in this case, the children within 100 city blocks in Harlem and doing what ever it takes to help them secure a bright future. There is no one thing.
 Saul’s new book. Click on image to review and/or purchase Business model innovation is all about experimentation. It is about combining and recombining capabilities from across silos until something clicks and value is delivered in a new way. It is never just one thing. It starts with a big idea that gets the juices flowing and attracts others with similar passion to the new approach. The big idea has to be translated from the white board on to a real world test bed to demonstrate that the idea is feasible. Starting small and demonstrating progress is key to building credibility and expanding a network of interested stakeholders. An ongoing portfolio of small-scale experiments to fail fast on those without merit and to prioritize those with the potential to scale is critical.
We also must get far more comfortable with hacking capabilities. Capabilities are the amino acids of innovation. They are the building blocks that enable value delivery. Innovation is a better way to deliver value and is often the result of repurposing existing capabilities. Locking capabilities into rigid organization structures and proprietary closed systems gets in the way of unleashing new sources of value and solving many of the important challenges of our time. Innovation is about hacking capabilities. Business model innovation happens when we enable random capability collisions resulting in new and unexpected ways to deliver value.
A good example of the power and potential of hacking capabilities is Microsoft’s (MSFT) Kinect. Microsoft introduced Kinect in November 2010 as a product extension to its Xbox franchise. Kinect adds a very cool capability for Xbox game players by getting rid of the hand held game controller and turning players into their own controllers. Microsoft and cool haven’t been used in the same sentence for a long time. Kinect is cool.
Microsoft predictably launched Kinect with it’s deeply ingrained proprietary product mind set. You could buy Kinect as a bundle with an Xbox or as a separate component to attach to an existing Xbox for $150. While Microsoft views Kinect as a product the global geek community views it as a capability. To geeks, Kinect is a powerful capability screaming to be hacked and repurposed for exciting new uses beyond its use as an Xbox extension. What a bargain for only $150. It’s a hackers dream.
And hack they will. A crowd of makers, programmers, roboticists, and other assorted and sundry geeks are having at it to explore what Kinect can enable beyond Microsoft’s initial intention. It’s only a matter of time before we see new gesture based applications and platforms. How about gesture based health care and education applications to start?
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Saul Kaplan: Experiment All the Time
By Jason Atkinson, on Mon Oct 22, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET We only have 24 Hours to go. If you want to donate, now is the time. Click here
I want to thank everyone, all 82 of your so far, who’ve believed in me, this idea, and this film.
I told Jeff Martin, the Producer, imagine 82 people from across the globe, standing together in one room, cheering us on.
For me, this is unfulfilled. Making this film, changing hearts and minds through the human side of this river’s recovery, is something I just have to do.
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