Discovering Frameworks

As you benchmark your businesses and search for inspiration, look beyond your direct competition into what is happening in other industries. Looking past what is directly in front of you is often where game-changing products and services are born.

I call this process “discovering frameworks.” Frameworks are any process or system devised to run a successful business. The best frameworks are those you develop on you own, not by replicating a competitor’s business model. That’s something anyone can do with the right inspiration.

I’ve done this myself many times. On a large scale, I adapted the framework of the mail order industry as the basis for an Internet shopping mall. On a smaller scale, I adapted the soccer tradition of assigning one jersey number (12) to represent the fans. This was so popular in soccer as a way to connect soccer to its fans, couldn’t this be applied to the industry in which I was an owner – baseball? Thinking this way, I assigned the uniform number 10 to the fans of Rakuten’s baseball team. This has been a big success and drawn widespread support from the fans. This successful outcome is not a big surprise. The framework existed in soccer. I simply adapted it to baseball.

Far too often, people are unwilling to see how frameworks can be transferred. They assume that because something has not yet happened in any given industry, that it never will, that it never could. As a boy I lived in the United States for two years while my father was a visiting professor at Yale University. Back then, it was said, “Americans will never eat sushi.” Today, it’s widely popular. Biases and stereotypes made it difficult for many to see how the food item could transcend cultural and national borders. But it did.

My point is that there are plenty of common frameworks that no one in your industry has noticed. You can import an idea, just as you can import a product. Frameworks are out there, ready for the taking.

My book: Marketplace 3.0

(Photo: ぽこ太郎)