Apple, Google, and Amazon are not simple to categorize as businesses. Behaving like ‘system disrupters’, they purposely break down barriers and link industries, technologies and services in new combinations around shared marketspace.
In the field of complex adaptive systems, this concept is known as the “adjacent possible”: at any given moment in evolution – of life, of natural systems, or of cultural systems – there is a space of opportunity that surrounds any current configuration of things. Change happens when you take that configuration and arrange it in a new way.
Strategic innovation based on systems concepts is a new orbit for competitive strategy. Complexity itself is the thing to work with creatively; emergence -- new properties arising from the interaction of pieces in a system -- is the focus for creating and capturing value.
The Adjacent Possible.
Creating A Market Economy in Afghanistan
A different context in central Asia would emerge combining the United States and Australia in a rough mix, a system vision to create a market economy in Afghanistan based on its untapped mineral wealth. These previously unknown deposits – including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium -- have been described by geologists as “so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry, that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world”.
The ‘adjacent possible’ provides a jumping-off point for strategic innovation, linking mining, infrastructure, government, healthcare and military components around shared marketspace. The identity of NATO is redefined, becoming a “system administrator force” in the region; this is a new vision for United States military power currently being advanced as the future of war within the context of everything else.
Download Concept: Strategic Innovation for Central Asia
Increasing Marketing Competitiveness
Ecosystem marketing is a new structure for action. It centers on the art of arranging and balancing disparate activities from the marketing services and information technology domains into whole new configurations. It is the intimacy of interaction -- the way pieces are connected in time and space -- that changes how campaigns are planned, creates a new context for competition, and delivers a qualitative leap in business performance.
Download Concept: Increasing Marketing Competitiveness
Redefining the Informational Role of "Drug Company"
Pharmaceutical companies are generally trying to solve problems of efficiency and replication around better drug development and promotion. This is the wrong set of problems.
The drug industry, like many other industries and governments throughout the world, are failing because they have not adapted to the breakdown of Industrial Age ideas, and a total change in context for strategy. They are groping in the dark without a new theory to guide action.
All agree the trajectory of the healthcare system in the United States, and in most other countries, is not sustainable. Despite many waves of debate and piecemeal reforms, the U.S. health care system remains largely the same as it was decades ago – nothing convincing has surfaced to disrupt the status quo, and to offset the rising costs of an aging population and new medical advances.
Redefining the informational role of “drug company” can create space for at least one fresh approach. New context emerges, for example, by combining Pfizer and GE Healthcare in a rough mix to generate new information about the science of statins. Adding Yahoo as the internet component expands its potential value further. More broadly, enabling this kind of process would help the pharmaceutical industry access a transition space to move into an information-oriented society.
Download Concept: Strategic Innovation in Healthcare
An Emerging Concept: Self-Generating Markets
"Self-Generating Markets" -- Blue Spoon Consulting is leading the development of 'self-generating markets' as strategy innovation for economic policy. This is an examination of how the concept of brand can be used to create new economic systems. The implication is that business and government collaboration will be less about managing an individual sector, and more about creating and enabling coordination across new industry ecosystems. Visa, with annual sales volume of $1.4 trillion and growth of 20 percent a year, is the prototype...and remains the only example.
