This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at finding opportunities in this new world.
Thomas Kuhn’s Theory goes like this. Normal science happens when science is going along doing sciency things. Scientists are doing research, publishing papers, and expanding the sum of human knowledge. Normal science is all about filling in the details.
It is like an artist who has made a sketch of a cat in pencil, going over and giving more depth and texture to the fur, applying pain to bring the animal to life on the paper.
In this happy state, there are some problems. Science, at most times, has a big theory about how most things work. Right now, it is the standard theory that explains how the universe fits together. In psychology we had Freudianism. In music, we had punk, rock, pop, and rap. And in art Modernism, surrealism, post=-modernism. You get the idea.
There’s an overarching way of looking at the world.
Why are people sad?
The problem is there are always things that can’t be explained by this theory. Freud was pretty good at explaining why people were sad, not so good at explaining why we are happy. That took the shift to Positive psychology started by Martin Seligmann.
The standard theory can’t understand why there is less dark matter than there should be or why the universe isn’t expanding at the rate that models think it should.
These problems, Kuhn, called them anomalies, sit there, and some scientists start worrying at them. They try experiments to understand them. Sometimes they get more data, and the anomaly or problem disappears. Other times the more they experiment, the bigger the problem seems to be.
Over time some of the anomalies get bigger and bigger, and they start to call the whole overarching theory into doubt. This is when science shifts from the normal state into the revolutionary state. A scientist will come up with a radical idea that challenges old orthodoxy and forces everything to change.
Galileo vs Thomas Kuhn’s Theory
Sometimes like with Galileo there is pushback (which to be fair was reasonable in his case. He was right, but had as much evidence as Pons and Fleischman for cold fusion). as compared to Thomas Kuhn’s theory. At other times there is a rapid uptake, and a huge golden age happens. The 1920s-40s in physics was one as scientists discovered how to unlock the atom and human knowledge changed irrevocably.
Out of this revolutionary period, you then get a new standard theory forming and science slowly resets back down into normal science.
I’ve talked about this applying to science. The big revolutions – moving from thinking the earth is the center of the universe to think that the sun is. Then moving from a solar-centric world view to one of quantum physics. These are big revolutions that most people are familiar with.
But in many small niches, statistical pupillometry for example, (revolutionised by Daniel Kahnemann) the same process plays out – with theories being challenged, overturned, and normalised in their turn.
At this point, you are probably wondering why you are reading this. This is, after all, a book about business. We can apply many of the same insights to the business. Doing this helps us to understand the weaknesses of existing business models and increases our chances of creating models that are transformative in the business landscape.
Read on to find out how we do this.
If You Want to Read More
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