I spend a fair amount of my time trying to understand how people see and use innovation as a concept to drive new forms of business value. Yup, it’s the silver bullet that going to solve all those business challenges that surface over and over again. Innovation is sold as the mechanism that will get new life into the business that will get people to be invigorated, offerings to be re-articulated in order to be competitive, and cure all those ailments that will make the business successful in the future.

With all of this in the background, you have to deal with the hundreds of titles on innovation, creativity, and any other word that will make the sale of your intellectual output saleable. And now, yet another view on innovation?

In Collins and Porras’s ground breaking book, Built to Last (and followed by Good to Great), a number of characteristics of how companies outperform their competitors are unpacked. The intention here is not to invalidate their work, but to question some of those sacred business topics that have caused us to amplify our situation trap. Competing from a “core” is not the way in which modern business are transforming themselves. Living by the code, or the “core”, is not the thinking that will prevail going into the future.

Built to Thrive, for me, is about the signs that I’ve noticed on the business landscape. Its about the ecosystem shifts that have happened right under our noses, because we’re too busy focusing on the “core”. We’re obsessed with executing something, anything, as long as we’re doing things. Landscaping and business ecosystem thinking has shown us that the world has changed. Changes that have been executed and implemented by a generation, not understood by current corporate citizens. Social orders and networks have created a new order of reasoning about what’s its like to be in business.

Built to thrive is trying to unpack those drivers that we have noticed, but cannot place in our existing vocabulary. Without a place to store it in our already contaminated mental states, its easier to ignore the signs. The journey over the last couple of years has opened up the proverbial pandora’s box. My mind has opened to a new and fresh way of seeing things in their new setting, utilizing old and new theories in new contexts with different environmental characteristics.

Life is one major experiment…

Welcome to the Built to Thrive Experiment. This blog is for those who want to rethink the future of business and its purpose. I will explore the research journey and validate the ten key constructs in the Built to Thrive collective.