Are unconventional business models in vogue?

Sometimes the path to business success winds in unexpected directions. Strategies that seem eccentric or downright wacky can disrupt stale industries and fuel innovative thinking. The companies making razor-thin margins selling commoditized razors probably dismissed the concept of subscription shave clubs as too zany. Selling DNA test kits to consumers to analyze their ancestry or genetic health risks likely raised eyebrows among lab testing giants.

Real visionaries don’t just incrementally improve the status quo. They imagine entirely new paradigms and care more about the problem they’re solving than conventions. The best ideas often start scribbled on napkins and hashed out over beers, not in sterile boardrooms.

Business leaders today need to foster a climate where creativity reigns, no matter how absurd the initial concept sounds. Every market-shifting company started with a spark of imagination that defied the default corporate playbook.

Experimenting with the unconventional does court risk, of course. But taking measured chances is what separates the innovators from the conventional crowd. The companies with the courage to sometimes think differently and nurture those offbeat ideas will write the next generation of business lore.

But this could turn out to be a herculean task when business innovators seek to think outside the box and defy set-down rules that have hitherto guided the rise of conglomerates. The innovators have been tagged disruptors due to their unconventional ideas that created the paradigm shift that the world didn’t even know it needed.

I strongly believe that the more unconventional innovators that are allowed to thrive in the business sphere will create the next generation of disruptors that will open up our horizons to what is possible in business.