Very likely, it will from a company in a different industry. Market revolutions rarely start with insiders. It takes fresh eyes with a different perspective to spot the gaps in established systems and structures.

• Coach manufacturers and railroad companies did not start the automotive industry.

• The Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop before they started building airplanes.

• FedEx and Starbucks did not emerge from the classic patterns of their respective industries.

• During World War Two, Henry Kaiser, who had never built a ship in his life, revolutionized the shipbuilding industry by introducing the concept of pre-assembled components used in other industries. He was able to put ships together in less than 21 days! Kaiser came from the construction industry.

• Start with industries that complement yours. After 9/11, the airline industry eliminated meals on domestic flights; instead, they offered snacks. Now, they don't offer anything for free other than soft drinks. Instead of snacks, they do offer to sell you pre-packaged meals, mostly sandwiches. Is there an opportunity here?

• Well, if you are thinking of one, you may be too late. Some airlines are already selling packaged meals produced by a company named Go-Picnic. According to early reports, they are actually good, and may even dispel the memory of what we used to disparagingly call "Airline Food."

• So, what is going to happen to the In-Flight Food Service companies? Some may go out of business, others may attempt to follow Go-Picnic's example. Goddard Enterprises Limited, a Barbados-based company whose catering division provides in-flight food service to airlines in 22 countries, has opened a number of airport fast-food outlets called Grab N Go. Their products are designed specifically to be taken aboard flights that don't serve food.

• Successful innovation does not require that you abandon your core strengths. Quite the contrary, the secret is to find new ways to apply them. Looking beyond your industry can help you find those new applications. Goddard's strength lies in its ability to provide good food where and when it is needed. When British Airways scheduled its supersonic Concorde to land regularly at Barbados, they chose Goddard Catering to provide the very fancy meals for those flights. To give you an idea of just how fancy those meals were, all the 120 trays for each Concorde flight had to be decorated with orchids of the same color.

• What could surgical instrument suppliers learn from the maintenance pits at the Indy 500 race? Through special design, constant training, and developing speedier procedures, pit crews are able to change all four tires on a car in 12 seconds! Not that surgery should become a speed contest, but selecting the right instruments for each operation, sterilizing and protecting them against contamination are time-consuming processes.

• Hospital supplier Cardinal Health took a look at these processes and developed pre-sterilized, pre- packaged instrument trays for not only each type of surgical procedure, but even according to each surgeon's preferences. Given the national shortage of nurses, can you imagine how much time and effort this saved?

• In turn, the processes and tools designed for the pit crews at Indianapolis might serve as inspiration to those companies that produce the tools we keep in our cars. They might also learn from the manufacturers of the Swiss Army Knife to offer an equivalent one-device-does-it-all product for tire changing.