Disruptive Flywheels as Business Model

The idea of disruptive flywheels, new term to me, but worth a look.  Reading further.

How to build disruptive strategic flywheels
Gaming, artificial intelligence, and deep learning are paving the way for dynamic and resilient 21st-century business models.  by Sundar Subramanian and Anand Rao  In Strategy-Business

A large auto manufacturer asked a consulting firm to evaluate its competitive position in relation to ride-sharing startups building autonomous vehicles. Instead of viewing this as a classic strategy project, with a business case, PowerPoint decks, and five-year projections, the firm created a “game” that the automaker could “play” against its competitors. An artificial intelligence (AI) system modeled the voluminous individual choices available to customers, companies, and other entities as digital twins (a digital twin is a computerized replica of a physical asset, process, consumer, actor, or other decision-making entity). The hundreds of thousands of simulations suggested many strategic bets, option-value bets, and “no-regret strategies,” or moves that made strategic and financial sense in a multitude of situations. The selection of those strategies, in turn, made the AI system smarter through learning mechanisms called reinforcement learning, which then further empowered humans to make better decisions. As time progressed, the company was able to choose precise market approaches, pricing, advertising, and customer strategies for multiple cities and communities.

Taken together, these actions created a flywheel, a concept borrowed from the power industry to describe a source of stabilization, energy storage, and momentum, and that was popularized in the strategy context by the author Jim Collins. Executives, instead of trusting instincts and prior assumptions, were able to harness the power of this strategic flywheel to verify hypotheses in simulation and in the real world. Doing so exponentially expanded the array of strategic choices and reduced the cost of experimentation. Rather than paralyzing decision makers with the abundance of options they created, the simulations produced clarifying insights. The result for this auto manufacturer has been a multibillion-dollar valuation of its new services, achieved in less than two years.

Games. AI. Continuous execution and adjustment. Thousands of scenarios to consider. This is not how strategy at blue-chip companies has been done in the past. But it is how business leaders are starting to do strategy now, and how we will need to do strategy in the future — that is, if we are to develop strategies that can both withstand and adapt to the increasing pace of change and disruption that is evident in all industries. .... "