Mary Panttaja

A Thought Meander on New Business Model Opportunities

I have spent the last few months studying new business models, new technology, what’s happening, who’s happening. There seems to be a lot of turmoil, a lot of thrash and crash, and also a lot of steady business and technology development.

As someone who is in the midst, as always, of figuring out what wants to happen next in my life, I look on curiously to see what can apply to my situation. What can I leverage? Where can I contribute?

In my previous business endeavors, I essentially used one key skill to build a career and a company. I could learn new technologies fairly quickly and see how to leverage them in a structured fashion. My husband and I built our first consulting company by always being the earliest adopter on the block—after carefully picking the right adoptee. It was the only way a small consulting company could stay ahead of the Andersons, as it were.

So now I’m looking at what’s happening with an eye to see if there is any place for me in this dynamically changing environment, and if so, what would the opportunity look like?

One thing I see is that the new wave of extraordinary technological capabilities has enabled some incredible ideas to come to fruition. Some of them are potent, and some of them are, well, a little dorky. (There are many directions to go with these observations, many of which have been covered. Read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson for one discussion of why technology has made the world a new place. Read Tim O’Reilly and his gang, who write on many of these opportunities.)

What’s new? Well,

• Tools are better and enable you to design and build anything more quickly.
  We have a world-wide delivery system. And it’s instant for digital products, like music, books, software.
• We have a world-communication system. You can have a conference call with any group of people distributed almost anywhere in the world.
• We have a world marketing platform that enables you to talk with your customers all day long from your bedroom.
• This is not to mention the very new things that you can build with the current technologies.

The major point for me is that suddenly you can do more with much, much less that was ever possible. And that turns out to be critical for maximizing the potential of a young organization.

(Remember the heady days at the end of the century when HR was hiring so many people per day that it was frightening? Turns out we were right to be very afraid.)

More (with less) tomorrow.

I started reading “Nonzero” by Robert Wright last night. I had picked it up as interesting in my research at one point—but last evening it was finally begun.

Right off I was struck that his analysis is very meaningful to my theories of creative engagement and innovation. (Of course, this is always a potential trap!) His basic thesis is that life with all its creative evolution is a non-zero-sum game. A zero-sum-game is one in which everything of value goes to one player or the other—there is a winner or loser and the stuff of value is split between them. What one gets the other does not.

But Wright contends that life in the big picture is not a zero-sum game but non-zero-sum game. That is, in its ability to create, evolve, and innovate, life creates situations where every participant can win, where each “game” can improve the life situation of all the players. Not that it always works this way—there is not a guaranteed outcome—but if it did not work this way in general, how do we find ourselves in a world with such vast creative results, high complexity and diversity, and successful innovation?

Then this morning I used a visual search engine recommended by Michael Arrington in Techcrunch (Quintura Visual Search Engine Relaunches) to seach the term “creativity” for work related to “Catching the Updraft!.” I was immediately stuck by the usefulness of the Quintura approach, using a tag cloud to present and help you navigate the data. I have a strong bent towards visual representations. It was immediately intriguing and productive.

In the tag cloud, I found an interesting site from David Weeks, a creativity expert in the UK, Creativity and Innovation in Business. He has a cartoon series called “D and his thinking heads”. It in he discusses the difference between the “logical” brain and the “creative” brain.

I immediate saw a connection that may help me evolve my explanations about what is working when “creativity” is flourishing and when it doesn’t. Perhaps the “logical” brain is always (or often) playing a zero-sum game, where the “creative” brain is based, like the evolutionary process itself, in a non-zero-sum game. Both potentially useful for their own purposes—-but exactly that—not general purpose or all-purpose brains.

In our methodology we use something we call modes—which are different styles of operation or engagement with the process—embodying different relationships to the creative process. With this new metaphor I can see that some of them are more intentionally non-zero-sum based, working to make non-zero-sum assumptions about the world.

So, as usual, things are flowing that make more things flow—definitely a non-zero-sum morning.