Your mindset naturally constrains your ability to consider alternatives and possibilities that go beyond the boundaries of your thinking. Your limiting assumptions can be about personal skills, team knowledge, and abilities, organizational capabilities, market needs, technology, financial limitations, partnership possibilities, competition, or just about anything else. 

When it comes to strategy and innovation, success depends on how fast you become aware of your assumptions and then modify them. But it's a paradox: You can't see your most fundamental assumptions until you overcome them.

Find a company completely outside of your industry or market and look at what makes them different and what they do really well. Then adapt their model to your cause.

• Use the format "I want to be the \___________ of ____________" by putting a company name i...