The Generativity Advantage: Unpredicted Innovation at Scale

How can businesses systematically profit from innovations they never predicted, created by people they’ve never met, solving problems they didn’t even know existed?

While many businesses celebrate user innovation, few take their user-innovators seriously enough as entrepreneurs. The Generativity Advantage brings powerful ideas from technology generativity theory into the domains of business strategy and entrepreneurship. It explores ways to specifically design products to spur user innovation (product generativity), and to build dynamic markets for those innovations (market generativity), in order to achieve a strategic ＂generativity advantage＂--the ability to systematically profit from the unpredicted innovations of others on a massive scale.

Through numerous case studies--from Apple and Google to emerging leaders in generative AI and no-code technology like OpenAI, Anthropic, Bubble, Notion, Coda, and Webflow--it shows how product generativity and market generativity can together create a powerful flywheel effect and sustained competitive advantage. Yet the book also demonstrates that achieving a generativity advantage is neither easy nor trivial; the world’s leading companies struggle to implement these ideas effectively. The book’s key lesson is to help your user-innovators succeed as serious entrepreneurs and you will benefit generously in turn.

Whether you’re building a digital platform, a marketplace, or any product that allows users to innovate, this book provides the conceptual tools and practical strategies needed to transform your platform into an engine of continuous innovation. Learn how to move beyond celebrating user creativity to systematically enabling and profiting from user entrepreneurship, creating value at scales previously unimaginable.

Mohammad Keyhani is Associate Professor at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, where he directs the DBA program and teaches courses on generative AI and no-code technology for entrepreneurs. Mohammad’s research has been published in leading journals and presented in international conferences where he has received multiple best paper and best reviewer awards. Mohammad is co-founder of www.HoneybeeLogic.com, advisor to multiple startups, and has held roles as Lab Strategist at the Creative Destruction Lab Rockies, and a David Rockefeller Fellow at the Trilateral Commission. He holds a doctorate in strategic management from York University, and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from the University of Tehran. His blog and projects can be found at www.DigitVibe.com.