Business Model Innovation

Even things as important as cash flow, profit, growth, continuous improvement, and innovation can become tiresome if harped on to excess. So we seek a certain balance, then find 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, pros and cons, ever present opposition in all things, ebbs and flows in various forms, all giving rise to opportunities. So it is with markets.

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.

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

Business survival, much less thriving in hard times, 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.