Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.

There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.

It is when the product is not good enough that proprietary integration gives you a competitive edge. You cannot outsource and be competitively successful in this situation. But at the other end, where standard components assembled in standard ways can yield acceptable performance, you must outsource.

The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.

If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.

I was lucky enough to build on the work of a number of people who had already run laps around this theory-building track. The original classification scheme, years ago, distinguished radical from incremental change. The theory said that established firms managed incremental change well, but would be expected to founder when their industry encountered a radical change.

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.