The Catalyst Age is upon us and David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, co-authors of Catalyst Code, have developed the first Framework™ for navigating in this new world.

Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies is the handbook for 21st century business. It unlocks the secrets behind the business models that today's innovators use to create new industries and disrupt old ones.

The book is based on the discovery that many of the world's most important businesses — from Lloyds of London to Hearst Newspapers to Microsoft to Google — have made profits by simultaneously bringing together distinct customer groups who need each onto the same platform. It demonstrates that, to succeed, catalysts must defy traditional business and economic wisdom when designing business models, pricing schemes and organizational incentives.

Catalyst Code shows executives and entrepreneurs how to innovate and profit by following an original 6-step Framework™ based on new economic theory, business history, and extensive interviews with established and emerging catalysts.

What Are Catalysts?

Catalysts are the new business powerbrokers. Fueled by the increasing interdependence of global markets, technology, and consumers, catalysts are reshaping entire industries as they mobilize two or even more distinct customer groups around a common platform in order to create value and drive profits.

eBay and Amazon are examples of catalysts, having built e-tailer empires using the catalyst code. Visa did it with payment cards — it got merchants and cardholders to use the same transaction platform. Microsoft and Google are in a race to crack the code on search-based advertising — that is get advertisers and searchers on board their respective platforms. While long-established players like Simon Properties does it with malls — it gets retailers and shoppers together at its "shopping" platform, rising stars like LinkedIn, Facebook, TiVo, MySpace.com, i-mode, Octopus, and Brightcove are also hoping to do it by bringing content to users.

Cracking the Catalyst Code

Being a successful catalyst only looks easy until you try it. Relying on traditional business school tenets has taken unsuccessful catalysts off course. Catalysts flourish or fail depending on their ability to balance the interests of the multiple customer groups they seek to unite — and more importantly, to monetize those interactions.

Success cannot be achieved following traditional economic theory or business strategy. Cracking the catalyst code requires counterintuitive steps to devise pricing models, incentive plans and organizational structures that keep the balance that is the lifeblood of these businesses.

» For the latest thinking on catalyst strategies, visit the Author's Blog.

A Framework™ For Profitability

Catalyst Code gives executive and entrepreneurs a roadmap for how to create a successful catalyst business based on work with and analysis of the world's most successful catalysts.

Rooted in the hottest area of business strategy and management science and based on the authors' experiences working with some of the most successful catalyst companies worldwide, the Framework™ reveals the otherwise little-known strategic DNA inherent in these companies.

Catalyst Code and the 6-step Framework™ offer an analytical and implementable roadmap for executives based on how the most successful companies of all time have navigated their way to profitability.

» Learn more about the Catalyst Framework™