Monday Morning Mojo

Game Change!

Today I am writing about the game of business. I find it useful to define this game using four elements:
1. The value proposition,
2. The core competencies required to deliver that value,
3. The set of target customers, and
4. The reframing that takes place in the minds of the stakeholders.

For example, let’s take a brief look at the history of a real game-changer, the self-propelled car or automobile.

As far as we know there were attempts at designing and perhaps even building a steam-driven self-propelled vehicle in the late 17th century. It was a fancy at that time. The first designed carried no passengers.

A good one hundred years later a steam-powered tricycle was built. This and other attempts were plagued by problems that kept them breaking down before they could be of any real use. Another hundred years went by and the time was ripe for a true self-powered car, the progenitor of today’s vehicles.

With competitors on several fronts, Karl Benz first put together a four-stroke cycle gas engine along with three rubber tires, a well-crafted steering mechanism, and a single-speed transmission in 1885. He patented his creation in 1886. Twenty-five Benz vehicles were sold over the next seven years, and this marked the beginning affordable, functional automobiles.

Benz dominated the early market. His name still stands today representing extreme quality. (Did you know it was his wife, Bertha, who financed his early fruitful efforts?)

Here is an outline of his game change using my four elements:
1. Benz's primary value proposition shifted from developing reliable engines to producing affordable automobiles.
2. He demonstrated the core competencies required by parlaying his recognized skill with engines and extending it to include other components of a well-designed automobile.
3. His target customers shifted away from those who wanted engines and toward those who wanted better travel.
4. He went from being a tinkerer and inventor who designed and delivered a great engine to the creator of the first modern automobile, a well demarcated turn of the page. It was a shift into a new era with great favor bestowed upon Benz and his company as a result.

Here are some other examples of game changes, these from the last 100 years:
�    In 1927 DuPont perfected moisture-proof cellophane making it possible to package foods that had to be protected and yet seen at the same time, spawning a new era of food packaging.
�    Multi-level marketing was created in the 1930s by Dr. Carl Rehnborg to sell his multivitamins, spawning Amway, today one of the largest private companies in the U.S.
�    In 1949 Robert Abplanalp invented a crimp on valve that enabled liquids to be sprayed from a can under the pressure of an inert gas. He patented it in the early 50s and went on to run Precision Valve Corporation that persists today as a leader in the industry, generating $100s of millions of revenue in its lifetime.
�    The introduction of the personal computer in the late 1970s spawned a new age in the development and sales of microprocessors which made continuous improvement a starting reality as every year greater power resulted from a smaller chip.
�    When Apple introduced their app store in 2008, the smart phone came into its own cementing Apple’s lead as a leading smart phone provider and changing the role of that communication device in your pocket.

What if you could engineer a similar game change, one that put you in a favorable position in the market? That's what innovation does and it's one of the things that I'll be exploring in the weeks ahead as I share with you advance excerpts of my forthcoming book, Getting Innovation Right: How Smart Leaders Use Inflection Points to Drive Market Success.

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