When a business stops growing, the instinct is to look sideways. See what the competitor is doing, copy what seems to work, adjust the price. The result is an entire sector that looks alike, fighting on discounts. Research on business models says the road is elsewhere: almost everything that changed the game came from outside the industry.
The number that changes the conversation
The University of St. Gallen analysed 250 business models applied over 25 years and found only 55 recurring patterns. The conclusion is what matters: more than 90% of business model innovations are recombinations of ideas that already worked in another industry. Not inventions from scratch. Transplants.
That changes the nature of the work. Innovating stops being the wait for an original idea — which nobody knows how to order — and becomes a search: find, in another market, a logic that solves a problem close to yours, and bring it into your context.
A Brazilian case, with numbers
Puravida is the example Rony Meisler told in his newsletter. Flávio Passos built the company by mixing concepts that don't usually travel together in the supplements and healthy food market. In 2021 it posted revenue of about R$ 295 million, up 42% year on year, with more than 200 products and nearly 400 employees. In May 2022, Nestlé bought 100% of the operation — the amount was never disclosed — and the founders stayed on running the business as executives inside the multinational.
The point isn't his sector. It's that the differentiation didn't come from making the same product slightly better, but from operating with a logic that competitors in that market weren't using.
How to find the pattern to recombine
This is the part that almost never comes with the advice. A path that works, in three steps:
- Write your current model in four lines. Who you sell to, what value you deliver, how you operate and where the profit comes from. If you get stuck on one of the four, you have found the most likely place for the change. (We break those questions down in why you innovate by changing the model, not the product.)
- List three industries that solved a similar problem. Not competitors: industries. Who else has to sell something expensive to someone who can't pay upfront? Who else needs recurrence on a rarely bought product? Who else has to prove quality before the purchase? Gyms, insurance, streaming, franchising, equipment rental, marketplaces — each solved it with a different pattern.
- Swap one piece, not four. Recombining isn't reinventing the company. It's taking an outside pattern and replacing one element of your model. Changing all four at once is like renovating the whole house: when it goes wrong, you won't know what broke.
Examples we live with
- The virtual try-on was born in fashion retail and today solves a furniture, décor and equipment problem: seeing the product in your space before buying, through a phone camera.
- The 3D catalogue started in industry, to show a technical part, and became a real-estate tool for selling what is still a floor plan.
- The monthly subscription from software reshaped services that were always sold as fixed projects — including our own augmented reality platform, billed monthly instead of per delivered experience.
None of them was an invention. All were mature patterns in one sector, applied where they weren't common yet.
Where recombination fails
Two repeated mistakes. The first is copying the pattern without the operation that sustains it: a subscription requires recurring delivery of value, and whoever only changes the billing sends a monthly invoice to a customer who sees no reason to continue. The second is recombining the wrong part: some elements are the reason the customer buys from you — trust, proximity, being served by someone who knows their name. Replacing that with a scale pattern destroys exactly what held the business up.
Add the reality check: if the pattern you want to import depends on volume you don't have, it isn't recombination, it's a bet.
A twenty-minute exercise
Take a sheet of paper. Write the four lines of your model. Then write three industries facing the same obstacle you face — not the same product, the same obstacle. For each, one sentence on how they solved it. You'll end up with three transplant candidates, and one of them is usually too obvious to have gone unnoticed this long.
When the piece that changes is the operation — recurring billing, self-service, a catalogue customers browse alone, a dashboard replacing the spreadsheet — the new model usually needs software that doesn't exist off the shelf. That is what we do in digital platform development.
Sources
The 55 patterns and the finding that more than 90% of business model innovations are recombinations come from the St. Gallen Business Model Navigator research (University of St. Gallen). The Puravida case and the prompt behind this text come from Rony Meisler's newsletter Business of Brands Post.