For most of my career, I’ve watched companies struggle with the same problem. They don’t lack execution. They lack direction. Teams are built to deliver, not to think upstream. So what happens is predictable. Roadmaps get filled with incremental work, innovation gets deprioritized, and the few good ideas that do surface are either too late or poorly formed.
Consulting was supposed to solve this. It didn’t. It packaged thinking into decks, added time and cost, and often disconnected strategy from execution. You get recommendations, not momentum. The handoff is where most of the value disappears.
So I keep coming back to a different model. One that feels less like consulting and more like college.
Not in structure, but in intent.
What if companies subscribed to ideas the way people subscribe to education? Not one-off engagements, but continuous exposure to thinking. Structured, evolving, and tied to real problems they are trying to solve. Instead of hiring consultants to drop in and out, companies would tap into a system that consistently challenges their assumptions, introduces new frameworks, and builds internal capability over time.
Think of it as “Ideas as a Service.”
Not random thought leadership. Not trend reports. Real, applied thinking delivered in a way that teams can absorb, question, and act on. Almost like a curriculum for innovation. Modules tied to specific domains like product strategy, UX, AI integration, or operational efficiency. Delivered with context, examples, and pathways to execution.
And here is where it starts to look like college.
You don’t just consume information. You engage with it. You test it. You build on top of it. There is progression. There is depth. There is a sense that over time, your ability to think and operate improves.
The question is whether companies would actually buy this.
On the surface, it sounds abstract. Hard to measure. Easy to deprioritize. Most organizations are wired to invest in outputs, not thinking. They fund headcount, tools, and deliverables. Not perspective.
But if you look closer, they are already paying for it. Just inefficiently.
They pay through bad decisions.
They pay through missed opportunities.
They pay through slow pivots and reactive strategies.
The cost of not having consistent, high-quality thinking inside an organization is massive. It just doesn’t show up as a line item.
So the opportunity is not to convince companies to buy ideas. It is to reframe what they are already losing.
The real challenge is packaging.
For this model to work, it cannot feel like education for the sake of education. It has to be embedded in the way companies operate. Close enough to execution that it drives action, but abstract enough to expand thinking. It needs to feel less like training and more like a competitive advantage.
That means tighter integration with product teams.
Clear links between ideas and measurable outcomes.
And a system that evolves as fast as the problems companies are facing.
If done right, this becomes something different.
Not consulting.
Not training.
Not content.
A layer that sits above execution and continuously sharpens it.
And if that layer actually works, the question is no longer whether companies will buy it.
It becomes whether they can afford not to.