Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, 240 pages., $29.95

Description

Business model innovation is the key to unlocking transformational growth--but few executives know how to apply it to their businesses. In Seizing the White Space, Mark Johnson gives them the playbook. Leaving the rhetoric to others, Johnson lays out an eminently practical framework that identifies the four fundamental building blocks that make business models work. In a series of in-depth case studies, he goes on to vividly illustrate how companies are using innovative business models to seize their white space and achieve transformational growth by fulfilling unmet customer needs in their current markets; serving entirely new customers and creating new markets; and responding to tectonic shifts in market demand, government policy, and technologies that affect entire industries. He then lays out a structured process for designing a new model and developing it into a profitable and thriving enterprise, while investigating the vexing and sometimes paradoxical managerial challenges that have commonly thwarted so many companies in their unguided forays into the unknown. Business model innovators have reshaped entire sectors--including retail, aviation, and media--and redistributed billions of dollars of value. With road-tested frameworks, analytics, and diagnostics, this book gives executives everything they need to reshape their businesses and achieve transformative growth.

Author(s)

Mark Johnson is chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India, which he cofounded with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. He has consulted to Global 1000 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries--including health care, aerospace/defense, enterprise IT, energy, automotive, and consumer packaged goods--and has advised Singapore's government on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mark's most recent work has focused on helping companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business model innovation. This work is the subject of the McKinsey award-winning Harvard Business Review article, "Reinventing Your Business Model," coauthored by Clayton Christensen and Henning Kagermann. Mark also coauthored The Innovator's Guide to Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2008), recently coauthored "How to Jump-Start the Clean-Tech Economy" (Harvard Business Review, 2009), and has published articles in the Sloan Management Review, Forbes.com, BusinessWeek Online, Advertising Age, and National Defense.

Prior to cofounding Innosight, Mark was a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he advised clients on managing innovation and implementing comprehensive change programs. Before that, he served as a nuclear power-trained surface warfare officer in the U. S. Navy.

Mark received an MBA from Harvard Business School, a master's degree in civil engineering and engineering mechanics from Columbia University, and a bachelor's degree with distinction in aerospace engineering from the United States Naval Academy. He currently serves on the board of the U.S. Naval Institute.

Mark, his wife, Jane Clayson Johnson, and their children live in Belmont, Massachusetts.