What changes everything: How an index of business innovation fuels growth

by Andrea Kates, Founder, Business Genome™

In 1944, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story called The Library of Babel. Borges’ work celebrated a library containing all of the knowledge of the universe and particularly the excitement it fostered. The down side: This magical library had no index, which led to mystery, frustration, depression, and yes, even insanity for the people trying to crack the code.

Don’t stop reading yet: this does have something to do with you and there’s a happy ending for business leaders in 2009. Sure, we’re facing information overload like never before. Our fundamental business advantage can’t be earned by simply having more information, or less symmetrical information, than our competition. (Think of the old ticker tapes that allowed stock brokers to be ahead of their customers.)

Those days are over.

But fear not: there is a powerful new approach to information that will provide the missing link between what we need to know and what we have to search through to find it.

Let’s start at the end of the story for most business leaders. Our search is not for information, per se. We really want to use information to solve the mystery of South Park’s Underwear Gnomes, whose business plan contained the classic puzzle cleverly reduced to shorthand ever since its exposure to television audiences: How do we solve Phase 2? These were well-intentioned gnomes who knew their core business strength was to collect underpants and their goal was to profit. Their only problem was the big question mark under their Phase 2 game plan: What comes in-between?

A Look to the Future: Where to Begin?

What all good Underwear Gnomes need is the ability to take the basic genomic sequence that makes their companies sing, buzz, profit, and grow today, and marry that genomic sequence with a look to the future: Where are the next customers going to come from? Who will our competition be tomorrow? How can we be ahead of the curve in anticipating future trends? What will it take to be a market leader in the next phase of our business? Where are some untapped opportunities?

In this context, access to infinite information with no way to sort through it is only part of the solution. The frustrating part.

What would change everything? An index of business innovations that have worked, combined with a kick-ass way to sort through the ideas, flipping and diving through the vast warehouse with ease. So that business leaders could imagine new ways to solve Phase 2.

Which brings us from gnomes to genomes.

Business genomes are patterns that describe the unique fingerprint of your company that you can now feed into a big shared library. Open source in nature so they can be shared and applied across industries. The Business Genome™ library, equipped with an evergreen index. That’s what we’re building. And, we’re inviting everyone to contribute.

With the Business Genome™ library, business leaders will no longer have to go crazy in a Library of Babel where they stare and stare at reports, but can’t figure out which of the many options for Phase 2 will be the right one.

Business Genome™ index would have allowed the head of Jiffy Lube to escape from his world view of WD-40 and lubricants, and start sniffing out ideas for waiting room experiences from Starbucks, health clinics, and banks.

The Business Genome™ index would allow the designers of a hospital emergency room to analyze the inner workings of a NASCAR pit crew to see how teams under pressure to coordinate tire changes under life-and-death circumstances made the whole process work. That emergency room design team could have sorted through the Business Genome™  index to glean some valuable lessons in how to rethink the emergency room to improve precision, save time, and save lives.

The Business Genome™ library, with its unique index, will reduce the risk of exploring new ideas because it will guide the search, by directing business leaders to who has done something like this before, like in the case of Jiffy Lube, who has created a fantastic waiting room experience for consumers. What can we learn from them that can lead to kick-ass results?

What’s great about the Business Genome™ library and index is that you don’t have to know what you’re looking for before you set out to be informed and inspired by the answers you’ll find. You can enter the Genome Zone with a hunch:

“I wonder why our customers aren’t buying desserts anymore. I wonder how we could still keep our check average at the same level as before.”

With the Business Genome™ library, your wondering will lead you down a path of information you can actually use to the best next action.

How are we building this vast library and index? We’re building it the new-fashioned way—with input from all the innovative leaders who are responsible for coming up with great ideas and making them work. The Business Genome™ is embarking on the pursuit of the most inspiring and effective examples of business innovations that have moved companies forward—business genomes, or unique patterns of business data. And, Business Genome™ is constructing an engine that will capture, sort, and store these genomes in an open-source structure that can be shared, searched, and recombined to make new businesses grow in the future.

We’ve studied the best ideas from the Encyclopedia of Life, the XPrize, Architecture for Humanity, Wikipedia, Pandora, the Netflix Prize. And other initiatives that have cracked the code on crowd-sourced engines. What all of these projects have in common is that they started with a simple idea, just like Edward O. Wilson’s original inspiration for the Encyclopedia of Life:

“Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth.”

And these projects have built their repositories, engines, and ecosystems of ideas, and in so doing, have allowed communities to make sense of information in new ways.

Over the next few months, we’ll start populating the Business Genome™ engine with stories, best practices, data, business fingerprints, and ideas that will encourage everyone to contribute, reward the most innovative ideas, and enable everyone to finally find something they’re looking for to solve the mystery of the Underwear Gnomes.

Business Genomes for gnomes. And, for the rest of us.

It’s an idea that will change everything. Stay tuned.

Musical Coda
The Laughing Gnome by David Bowie

I was walking down the High Street
When I heard footsteps behind me
And there was a little old man (Hello)
In scarlet and grey, shuffling away (laughter)
Well he trotted back to my house
And he sat beside the telly (Oaah..)
With his tiny hands on his tummy
Chuckling away, laughing all day (laughter)

Oh, I ought to report you to the Gnome office
(Gnome Office)
Yes
(Hahahahaha)

CHORUS
Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you can’t catch me”
Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you can’t catch me”
Said the laughing Gnome

Well I gave him roasted toadstools and a glass of dandelion wine (Burp, pardon)
Then I put him on a train to Eastbourne
Carried his bag and gave him a fag
(Haven’t you got a light boy?)
“Here, where do you come from?”
(Gnome-man’s land, hahihihi)
“Oh, really?”

In the morning when I woke up
He was sitting on the edge of my bed
With his brother whose name was Fred
He’d bought him along to sing me a song

Right, let’s hear it
Here, what’s that clicking noise?
(That’s Fred, he’s a “metrognome”, haha)

Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you don’t catch me”
Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you can’t catch me”

(Own up, I’m a gnome, ain’t I right, haha)
“Haven’t you got an ‘ome to go to?”
(No, we’re gnomads)
“Didn’t they teach you to get your hair cut at school?
you look like a rolling gnome.”
(No, not at the London School of Ecognomics)

Now they’re staying up the chimney
And we’re living on caviar and honey (hooray!)
Cause they’re earning me lots of money
Writing comedy prose for radio shows
It’s the-er (what?)
It’s the Gnome service of course

Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you don’t catch me”
Ha ha ha, oh, dear me

(Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you can’t catch me”
Ha ha ha, hee hee hee
“I’m a laughing Gnome and you can’t catch me”)

(One more time, yeah.)