The premise
The structural problem holding your business back has almost certainly been solved before, just in an industry you’d never think to look at. A law firm struggling with demand volatility can learn from how container shipping manages headhaul and backhaul asymmetry. A nonprofit trying to diversify revenue beyond grants can borrow the packaging strategy that SaaS companies use for tiered pricing. The book presents the Cross-Industry Solution Discovery Methodology: a practical, eight-step process for systematically finding, evaluating, and translating solutions from analog industries.
Who it’s for
Business strategists, innovation leads, management consultants, and ambitious firm owners who have exhausted the obvious playbook. There is a strong secondary audience in corporate innovation and R&D departments, which opens a different revenue and speaking stream.
Why this book
The methodology is genuinely rigorous. It is not “be creative” or “think outside the box.” It is an eight-step process with specific analytical tools at each step: abstract the problem into multiple framings, search for analogs per framing, catalog solutions with failure trajectories, decompose into component patterns, translate through the Six Levers, filter for viability, and score on five axes. Anecdote-driven innovation books are common. Methodology-driven ones are rare, and the good ones last. The container ship trip later this year becomes the narrative spine: a real vessel that’s 90% full one direction and 45% full the other, used as a worked example readers can follow with their own industries.
Status
Outlined, with field research underway via the container ship trip later this year. Writing begins after the first three books in the sequence ship. Expected publication is 2028.