Innovation, Business Models, and Catastrophe: Reframing the Mental Model for Innovation Management

Innovation is often considered to be the golden bullet of corporate success. However, seen on a global level, most of our present-day innovations and innovation strategies are fuelling a process which might well lead to global collapse. The reason for this is that innovation and innovation management are guided by a mental model of economy which seems beholden to the three mantras of “Outwit, Outperform, Outsmart”, “Be Better or Vanish”, and “Be Different or Die”. According to these mantras and the mental model behind them, corporate success can best be facilitated by the invention of product qualities, value propositions, and business models so exclusive that they secure absolute dominance over the market, the value chain, or the revenue stream. Guided by these principles, games of innovation that might in themselves be rational and, as such, often highly successful will fuel developments that are highly destructive on the global level, as they keep a constant downward spiral of acceleration, concentration, disruption, and resource depletion spinning. To counter the inherent destructiveness of present-day wealth creation, the mental model and mantras guiding our innovation games need to change. This can be done by aligning innovation and innovation management with the evolutionary and ecological principles of natural value creation and the values of the Global Ethos concept. Together, they form the basis for a new understanding of lastingly viable value creation and innovation management: the concept of ethicological business models and value propositions. Instead of fuelling a process that underlies the continuous and globally destructive mechanisms of concentration, disruption, and resource depletion, they have the potential to stop this downward spiral by establishing innovative forms of resource growth and added value creation cycles.