246 Business model innovation rarely happens by coincidence. But neither is it the exclusive domain of the creative business genius. It is something that can be managed, structured into processes, and used to leverage the creative potential of an entire organization. The challenge, though, is that business model innovation remains messy and unpredictable, despite attempts to implement a process. It requires the ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty until a good solution emerges. This takes time. Participants must be willing to invest significant time and energy exploring many possibilities without jumping too quickly to adopt one solution. The reward for time invested will likely be a powerful new business model that assures future growth. We call this approach design attitude, which differs sharply from the decision attitude that dominates traditional business manage- ment. Fred Collopy and Richard Boland of the Weatherhead School of Management eloquently explain this point in their article “Design Matters” in the book Managing as Designing. The decision attitude, they write, assumes that it is easy to come up with alternatives but difficult to choose between them. The design attitude, in contrast, assumes that it is difficult to design an outstanding alternative, but once you have, the decision about which alternative to select becomes trivial (see p. 164). This distinction is particularly applicable to business model innova- tion. You can do as much analysis as you want yet still fail to develop a satisfactory new business model. The world is so full of ambiguity and uncertainty that the design attitude of exploring and prototyping multiple possibilities is most likely to lead to a powerful new business model. Such exploration involves messy, opportunistic bouncing back and forth between market research, analysis, business model prototyping, and idea generation. Design attitude is far less linear and uncertain than decision attitude, which focuses on analysis, decision, and optimization. Yet a purposeful quest for new and competitive growth models demands the design approach. Damien Newman of the design firm Central eloquently expressed the design attitude in an image he calls the “Design Squiggle.” The Design Squiggle embodies the characteristics of the design process: Uncertain at the outset, it is messy and opportunistic, until it focuses on a single point of clarity once the design has matured. Design Attitude bmgen_final.indd 246 6/15/10 5:45 PM