Management Today UK

Featured Interview: Mark W. Johnson

AC: Can you tell us about your background?

Mark W. Johnson: Interestingly, like quite a few business thinkers - Michael Porter, Michael Hammer, and Peter Senge, for instance - I come from an engineering background, having degrees in aerospace engineering (from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis) and in civil engineering and engineering mechanics (from Columbia University) and having served as a nuclear power-trained surface warfare officer in the Navy.  I also hold an MBA from Harvard Business School.  I'm Chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India, which I co-founded with HBS Professor Clayton M. Christensen ten years ago this month.

With Professor Christensen and others, I've focused my research efforts on helping companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business model innovation.  This work was the subject of the McKinsey-award-winning Harvard Business Review article "Reinventing Your Business Model" in December 2008, co-authored with Professor Christensen and Henning Kagermann - work that I have greatly extended in my new book Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal.

I've also co-authored The Innovator's Guide to Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2008) and published articles in the Sloan Management Review, Advertising Age, and National Defense.

AC: How do you define "white space?"

Mark W. Johnson:  That's a great question.  There may be as many definitions of white space circulating as there are business thinkers.  Some people define it as a place where there's no competition, for instance.  Others define it as new markets or gaps in existing markets.

But I have a very specific meaning in mind that is particularly useful for strategy formulation.  By white space, I mean market opportunities that your company wishes to pursue that can only be addressed by using a different business model than the one it's currently using.  These might be opportunities to bring your own innovations to market - Apple's iPod/iTunes combination is a great example.  Alternatively, they might be imperatives to address a competitive threat - such as the threat the Internet poses for the newspapers' advertising-supported print-publishing business.

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