Hamilton Helmer

Probably the most prevalent was Porter's Five Forces, focused on what he calls industry attractiveness.

It was a tremendous contribution, but it's not insufficient.

If you're in an attractive industry, it doesn't get you the kind of security that an iPod has.

Right.

And there's been statistical work just buttressing that point more generally, that industry attractiveness doesn't explain a lot of firm differences in profitability.

Another one was Christensen's work on disruptive technologies, which is just phenomenally interesting and highly erudite.

But this example is perfect.

Disruptive is actually not correlated with long-term profitability.

It has to do with product market fit.

It basically says you've come up with a better way of doing something that takes out the incumbent.

It disrupts it.

So very interesting in that frame, but not for the Bomar iPod problem.

And then there's a whole strain of thought around capability analysis.

You can do a lot of things with capabilities, but it's not common that that's the basis of why you build great business models.

Other people have those capabilities as well.

So what that meant from a concept development framework is that I sort of had to go back to square one and say, okay,

I'm thinking about pattern recognition for entrepreneurs.

What's simple but not simplistic?

And one of the keys to that question is persistence, which is that if you were to say Apple's profitability next quarter, it's not a random draw, right?

It's highly persistent.