Actively Working on Disrupting your Business Model

Disrupting your own business model seems to be counter-intuitive from the perspective of someone accustomed to 20^th Century business models.  Traditionally when you get a business model that works, you “work it”, right?  It is providing the fuel for everything you do.  Successful businesses are really adept at leveraging their business models to make money.  One would think that a successful business model just needs to be nurtured and tweaked, right?  I think that it is safe to say that most 20^th Century oriented businesses (businesses that either started in the 20^th Century or have 20^th Century mindsets guiding them) would never even entertain working on making their own business model obsolete and disrupting themselves?

When we at Simone's 3D Tour Galleries had created a business model that worked for us and began to leverage it to make money; we understood that we needed to continually change and adapt it to meet the needs of the market.  We are living in a world of exponential technological change.  The futurist, Ray Kurzweil believes that the 21^st Century will usher in technological changes greater than the preceding 10,000 years of human history.  So what we perceive (from our 20^th Century oriented view points) is a change rate that is linear with a low angle upward slope to it.  In actuality, a graph of the real rate of change would resemble a hockey stick.  Change is happening at a rate that is impossible for us to wrap our minds around.  We see it happening all around us every day.  We all knew that shopping habits had changed dramatically and that at some point retail stores would be hurt.  Could anyone just a couple years ago have predicted the closing of thousands of big box retailers in 2017?  Thousands of retail outlets closed and it is likely that even more will close in 2018.  Technology has permanently changed the landscape of how we shop and transport products to our homes and businesses.  We are living in a era of mostly invisible change that is accelerating with each passing day.  So with all this change happening all around us, how much sense does it make to think that what you are doing right now will be viable in even just three years?  A wave of technological change is headed our way at high speed.  Given the recent and growing advances in areas like driver-less cars and artificial intelligence, does it make sense to think that anything you are doing now will be able to make you money in the near future?  The answer is no probably not, unless you are really lucky.

For us, actively working on disrupting our business model is something we have integrated into our business model.  Yes, we are constantly looking for ways to make what we currently do obsolete.  The reason for this is quite simple; we would rather disrupt our own business, than let someone else disrupt it for us.  We are always trying to change and adapt to meet the evolving needs of the market.  The process of continually innovating and looking for new technology, software, hardware and new revenue streams keeps us from focusing solely on just leveraging our current successful business model.  So we have turned the process of using and tweaking our business model into an active search for something that will make what we currently do obsolete. 

The 21^st Century will be a golden age for start-ups with new businesses to become serious agents of technological and cultural change.  It has been said that in the 21^st Century those who innovate will be rewarded for that innovation and those who don’t wont.  We have taken this a step further with: Businesses who actively seek to innovate and disrupt themselves will be rewarded for that innovation and desire for disruption and those who don’t will become lines in the history books.