Dare Obasanjo wrote a nice blog entry summarizing some key ideas from Marc Andreessen
and Clayton Christensen. In his entry entitled
Stupid Things Big Companies Do, he had a great exerpt that confirmed
that companies need to diversify their business models, offered up a key irony, and ended
by providing a possible solution:
People come up with lots of new ideas, but nothing happens. They get very
disillusioned. Never does an idea pop out of a person's head as a completely fleshed-out
business plan. It has to go through a process that will get approved and funded. You're
not two weeks into the process until you realize, "gosh, the sales force is not going to
sell this thing," and you change the economics. Then two weeks later, marketing says they
won't support it because it doesn't fit the brand, so we've got to change the whole
concept.
All those forces act to make the idea conform to the company's existing business model,
not to the marketplace. And that's the rub. So the senior managers today, thirsty for
innovation, stand at the outlet of this pipe, see the dribbling out of me-too innovation
after me-too innovation, and they scream up to the back end, "Hey, you guys, get more
innovative! We need more and better innovative ideas!" But that's not the problem. The
problem is this shaping process that conforms all these innovative ideas to the current
business model of the company.
