Thinking about things differently

21 April 2015. He invited his audience to “think about things differently”, for as soon as problems and structures struck us as familiar, we would rely on the same thought patterns. To develop new business models, however, we had to break out of the usual patterns of thought.

Mission to the moon

Google’s success was also based on the principle of “moonshoot thinking”: even if it was not clear how a goal could be reached, founders should strive for this “mission to the moon” in order to achieve great things.

The fact that business models cannot only be revolutionised by technical innovations but are often also successful because of a new design, was illustrated by the man from Silicon Valley with the help of the thermostat producers Nest, which has by now been acquired by Google. The recipe for success: a simple and elegant design for household thermostats.

Inefficiency as an opportunity

Inefficiency was an invitation to subvert existing markets. Thus the taxi app provider Uber had exploited the inefficiency of the traditional taxi system to revolutionise this market.

Another important success factor was creativity, without which even successful enterprises can become irrelevant from one day to the next – as happened to Kodak, which once led the photography market but then missed out on the digital trend.

Big companies are great competitors
Omid Scheybani encouraged his audience by saying that big companies were great competitors. In contrast to small firms, big corporations were only able to change very slowly. Small firms were able to adapt to the market more quickly and thus had an opportunity to undermine big corporations’ market power.

To conclude, Omid Scheybani provided his audience with another tip: “Become aware of what you yearn for, where your passion lies. If you follow your passion, there’ll be no stopping you.”

Picture: John Dow / photocase.com