Innovating and Thinking Together as a Young Entrepreneur
When I look at my life now, I see three big learning laboratories around me, my team EP1X, my apparel project Runava and my developing idea T‑Consultancy. Every week I move between pajas, customer talks, production problems and my own shyness about speaking up. Sometimes it feels exciting and sometimes it feels like standing in the middle of a storm. Reading The Business Model Navigator by Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger and Michaela Csik, Leading the Revolution by Gary Hamel and William Isaacs’ Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together gave me a new way to understand this storm. Together, these books showed me that if I want my projects or business to grow and maybe one day see Runava known outside Finland. I need three things at the same time, an innovative business model, a revolutionary mindset and the ability to create real dialogue in my teams.
In Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel, edition of 2000, 2002 describes how companies can no longer rely only on small improvements, they must constantly reinvent their business concepts and fight against strategy decay, where yesterday’s successful ideas slowly become tomorrow’s prison. He writes about industry revolutionaries inside firms like Schwab, Virgin and UPS who challenge assumptions, experiment with radical ideas and build internal markets for new business concepts instead of protecting the status quo. When I read the contents – “Facing up to the Revolution,” “Finding the Revolution,” “Igniting the Revolution” and “Sustaining the Revolution” – I felt he was talking directly to a young student like me who is trying to build something new while still learning basic skills (Hamel, 2000, pp. vii–ix). Hamel’s message is that revolution is not only for CEOs, anyone in an organisation can become a rebel who questions old logic and imagines new ways of creating value, and this idea pushed me to see myself as a small revolutionary already now in EP1X and Runava. In the figure 1 shows how strategy decay can be transformed into business reinvention through igniting a revolution in business concepts.
𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝟏. 𝐄𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.(𝐇𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐥 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟎, 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝).
While Hamel focuses on mindset, The Business Model Navigator gives a concrete toolbox for designing and innovating business models. Gassmann, Frankenberger and Csik of 2014 edition explain that most business‑model innovations are not completely new, they come from recombining existing patterns from other industries, and they have identified 55 such patterns in their research. In the contents pages I saw familiar names like Freemium, Subscription, Crowdsourcing, Mass Customisation, Trash to Cash and White Label, each connected to real company cases and clear explanations. The authors describe a business model through four key dimensions, who the customer is, what the company offers, how it creates and delivers that value and how it earns money and they show a step‑by‑step process for analysing the current model, exploring suitable patterns and then implementing change(2014, pp. 4–9, 83–335). For me this was encouraging, because it means I do not have to invent everything from nothing, I can stand on the shoulders of proven patterns and still be creative in how I combine them for my own projects. In the figure 2 shows four basic strategies for business model innovation, ranging from implementing a standard model to combining multiple patterns for a unique model.
𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝟐. 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬.(𝐆𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧, 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐬𝐢𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟒, 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝).
Isaacs’ Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together added the third piece, how people actually talk and think together while they are trying to innovate. In the excerpts we used in our course, he defines dialogue as a conversation with a centre, not sides, where people explore issues together instead of trying to win or convince each other. He explains the difference between debate, discussion and dialogue and shows how most organisational conversations, especially around difficult topics, fall into debate where each party defends their position and real learning stops. Isaacs introduces four core practices :- listening, respecting, suspending and voicing and argues that these are the inner skills needed to create a “container,” a safe but challenging environment where people can surface hidden assumptions, sit with polarisation and gradually reach new shared meaning ((Isaacs, 1999, pp. 81–83). When I compared this with my own paja notes about listening deeply, respecting others, suspending quick judgement and finding courage to speak, I realised I had already started to practise these ideas even before I had the full theory in my hands.In the figure 3 illustrates Isaacs’ core practices of dialogue, which are listening, respecting, suspending judgement and voicing one’s true thoughts.
𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝟑. 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬.(𝐈𝐬𝐚𝐚𝐜𝐬 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟗, 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝).
Reading these books together changed how I see my projects. Before, I mostly thought of tasks, printing this hoodie, answering that email, and preparing this presentation. Now I see that each project is also a system of choices about who we serve, what we offer, how we organise our work and how we earn money. For Runava especially, The Business Model Navigator helped me see that our current way of working is only one possible model, not the only one. For example, we already use elements of Mass Customisation by offering customised apparel, but we could combine it with a Subscription pattern where teams or companies receive regular drops or seasonal packages instead of one‑off orders, or even with Crowdsourcing, inviting customers and student designers to submit designs and vote for their favourites. The Trash to Cash pattern, which describes how firms turn waste or used products into value, inspired me to think about recycling returns or leftover fabric into limited‑edition pieces that support our sustainability values, and this makes my long hours on Runava feel less like random hard work and more like experiments inside a bigger design space of 55 patterns.
Hamel’s idea of leading a revolution pushes this thinking even further. He warns that many companies stay on the treadmill of incrementalism, improving processes a little but never questioning the deeper assumptions of their industry, and I recognised that risk in the custom‑printing world. One big assumption is that small teams like ours must stay local and low‑scale, serving only nearby customers with standard products, but after reading Hamel I started to ask different questions, what if Runava becomes a platform that connects student designers from many countries with ethical print partners and niche communities, and what if our main asset is not the machines but a strong brand and network. Hamel’s stories about corporate rebels who protect radical ideas even when others think they are crazy made me notice my own fear of sounding naive when I talk about big dreams for Runava, yet they also taught me that every revolution looks unrealistic at the beginning and that my job is to keep that imagination alive while staying grounded in numbers and strategy.
Isaacs’ dialogue principles reminded me that I cannot build these revolutions alone. In one of his case examples from a steel mill, he describes how union and management representatives who previously shouted at each other learned, through regular dialogue sessions, to sit in a circle without a fixed agenda, share their real concerns and gradually see themselves as part of one system instead of enemies. Over time they moved from blaming each other to jointly presenting their story to other companies, speaking as a “third entity” that contained both sides, which showed me how powerful a good container can be. When I read this, I immediately thought about EP1X and Runava: our conflicts are smaller, but we also have unspoken tensions, different visions and cultural misunderstandings, and Isaacs’ four practices gave me very practical tools for these situations. Listening for me now means preparing myself to really hear others instead of mentally reloading my own answers, respecting means looking again and trying to see the teacher inside each teammate, suspending means noticing my quick judgements and holding them up for examination instead of immediately acting on them and voicing means daring to speak my true questions or doubts even when my heart is beating fast.
Applying this to EP1X, I started to view our pajas less as meetings that must always produce quick decisions and more as opportunities to build that container where we can think together. My diary notes tell me how I am trying to listen more, judge less and use our differences to create new ideas for the team, and the books helped me see why this matters for innovation. When we rush too quickly to discussion or decision, we often skip the deeper dialogue where shared meaning is created, so now when we talk about our team values or about conflicts I try to propose a short check in round where everyone shares how they are arriving and I pay attention to moments of silence instead of fearing them. Isaacs describes similar practices in his executive dialogues and shows how silence can allow new thoughts to appear, which gives me courage to bring this slower pace into our busy student culture. In the future, I would like to initiate a few “no‑agenda” dialogues in EP1X where the only purpose is to explore a big question such as what kind of team we want to be for the next two years, if a steel mill can do it, then a student team can at least experiment with it.
For T‑Consultancy, the three books together have already shaped my early thinking. The Business Model Navigator suggests patterns like Solution Provider, Performance‑based Contracting, Revenue Sharing and Two‑sided Market, which push me to see consulting not as selling isolated workshops but as taking responsibility for a whole client problem and sharing risk and reward based on concrete outcomes. In practice this could mean designing packages where we diagnose the client’s situation, co‑create an action plan and link part of our fee to agreed indicators like increased sales or better employee satisfaction, combining economic logic with partnership thinking. Hamel’s revolutionary spirit encourages me to question the traditional image of consultants as distant experts who deliver long reports, instead, I imagine T‑Consultancy as a young experimental partner that uses prototypes, digital tools and rapid learning cycles, something closer to a lab than a typical agency, which fits well with Proakatemia’s practice‑based culture.
Isaacs’ dialogue work reminds me that the real value in consulting often comes from how we host conversations, not only from the advice we give. In his healthcare and city‑leadership examples, dialogue sessions allowed participants to name previously taboo issues, recognise their own part in the system and then move toward more coordinated action, and this is exactly the kind of shift many organisations need. If I can bring even a small piece of that into my client work, by designing sessions where stakeholders listen to each other, suspend blame and ask deeper questions, then T‑Consultancy can become more than just a student company, it can be a place where organisations experience new ways of thinking together. This also demands growth from me, I need to strengthen my own voicing so that I can gently challenge clients’ assumptions instead of only agreeing, and here my previous learning about courage, feedback and vulnerability from earlier books like What Matters Now, Future Skills and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team continues to support me.
On a personal level, these three new books connect strongly to the leadership journey I described in my earlier reflection “Standing in the Middle of Change,” where I wrote about choosing values over harmony, seeing innovation as experiments, building future skills and recognising team dysfunctions in trust and conflict. Hamel now shows me that the world also needs leaders who are willing to imagine new organisational logics, not only to fit into old ones, and that revolutionary ideas can start from student projects as much as from big companies. The Business Model Navigator teaches me that creativity can be systematic and evidence‑based. It is not just about inspiration but also about understanding patterns, numbers and customers, which is essential for making Runava and T‑Consultancy financially sustainable. Isaacs reminds me that none of this is possible if I cannot sit in honest conversation with others, listen to uncomfortable truths and still stay present, because real change grows from the quality of our dialogue.
The biggest lesson for me is that entrepreneurship is not only about working hard, it is about how I think and talk with others while I work. As Bijeeta, I still see myself as someone in the middle, between cultures, between shyness and courage, between student and entrepreneur and these books do not remove that feeling, but they give it direction. When I use Navigator’s patterns to design Runava, when I ask Hamel‑style revolutionary questions about our projects and when I practise Isaacs’ four dialogic skills in EP1X, I am already living the kind of leadership I want for the future, even if it still feels imperfect. Runava becoming famous worldwide is still only a dream, but now I see a path, a team that can think together, a business model that can scale and a mindset that is not afraid to challenge old rules, and step by step, conversation by conversation, experiment by experiment, I am learning to lead that revolution. In the figure 4 summarizes the leadership lessons I draw from Hamel, the Business Model Navigator, Isaacs and my own entrepreneurial mindset.
𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝟒. 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬.(𝐇𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐥 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟎, 𝐆𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧, 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐬𝐢𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟒 ,& 𝐈𝐬𝐚𝐚𝐜𝐬 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟗, 𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝).
Reference
Gassmann, O., Frankenberger, K., & Csik, M. (2014). The business model navigator: 55 models that will revolutionise your business. Pearson Education Limited.
Hamel, G. (2000). Leading the revolution. Harvard Business School Press.
Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue: The art of thinking together. Currency / Doubleday.
Articles / excerpts provided by TAMK
Isaacs, W. (1993). Dialogue, collective thinking, and organizational learning. Organizational Dynamics, 22(2), 24–39. (Excerpt used in TAMK course material “Dialogue, Collective Thinking, and Organizational Learning”.