What do Tivo, Vogue, the Mall of America and New York Stock Exchange have in common?

They are all catalysts. And, once you recognize what a catalyst is, you will see that catalysts play a growing role in many industries. Much as with the pattern recognition puzzles that psychologists sometimes use, it is hard to discern a catalyst until you know what to look for. You will discover that auction houses, financial exchanges, and nightclubs are catalysts. So are the Palm operating system, the Sony PlayStation, TiVo, and i-mode, the most popular wireless Internet service in Japan. They operate in different industries but all have chosen a business model that allows them to profit by getting different customer groups on board their platform, creating the powerful feedback loops that allow them to interact.

But catalysts follow their own unique patterns of organization and behavior. Like economists who first recognized catalysts for what they are, you will be stymied if you try to analyze or explain catalyst strategies using the conventional tools of strategic analysis.

Some of the necessary concepts, such as network effects, have been around for a while. But it has taken significant recent advances, and unlearning old ways of thinking, to figure out what really makes catalysts tick and thrive.

This book will show you how to crack the catalyst code. It will help you identify a community of agents from which it is possible to generate catalytic power. It will describe two-sided business strategies that have proved successful in establishing and sustaining profitable catalytic reactions.

It will also teach you the revolutionary business principles that will help you implement in new contexts the sophisticated pricing, design, and organizational techniques that some of the greatest catalysts have used to transform markets, provide value for their communities, and make fortunes for themselves.

This book isn't just for entrepreneurs looking to get into new businesses or evolve their current ones. It is also for the many businesses that work with catalysts as part of their communities.

Moreover, if you invest in, report on, work for, or represent an industry that is--or might be--shaped by economic catalysts, this book will reveal the forces that hold catalysts together and, sometimes, make their catalytic reactions fade away.