Instead of walking in from backstage for his ASI Chicago keynote, Luke Williams popped up from within the crowd, quickly winning attention with jokes about BlackBerrys, Blockbuster and other brands that failed to innovate and were blown past by competitors. “For most of human history, ideas lived longer than people,” said Williams, an NYU professor, author and holder of 30 U.S. patents. “For generations, you could’ve had a magnificent career for years without having to change your ideas.”

But today, Williams said, many industries are being forced to change their core ideas at least every decade, if not sooner. To make his point, he grabbed the vintage flip phone of ASI Chairman Norman Cohn and said to lots of laughter, “Well, you definitely can’t hack this, and you probably can’t turn it on anymore either.”

Indeed, the biggest players in phones in 2019 – Apple and Samsung – were infants in the space 10 years ago. Back then, Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson owned much of the market share, yet nowadays nobody uses their products to make calls, answer emails or scroll the web.

Williams then asked: “Where are the tools to help us escape our old ideas? There’s nothing wrong with the ideas in the promotional products industry. Does that mean they shouldn’t be challenged or changed? The ideas you’re using every day to think about your clients and the future – they’re the most important assets you own.”

Williams encouraged attendees to consider their business models and all of their components: client segments, distribution patterns, investments, equipment, people, and the brand recognition they’ve built. “All of these things are ingredients that can be rearranged to create more value,” Williams said. “Think of yourselves as master chefs in a kitchen, and use ingredients that are available.”

Pointing to so-called modern-day disruptors like Uber and Airbnb, Williams stressed that these companies didn’t really develop new ingredients, as much as they took what was already accessible and fit them into a new business approach. It involved “a willingness” to try unique recipes, Williams said.

If companies fail to innovate or only embrace incremental change – in essence cooking the same recipes over and over – they’ll find themselves in a dangerous positon, stuck in a commodity trap and up against constant price pressures. “When you cannot make any further incremental change, you reach the end of the path,” Williams said, making your firm vulnerable to disruption. “Really the only time we change is when we’re backed into a corner, facing irrelevancy. The work of disruption is doing the work of crisis without the crisis – when there’s no justified reason for doing it today.”

Williams, who spent most of his keynote walking among the audience, then moved to the stage to give a visual example. He put several shapes on the screen – comparing them to ingredients available in an industry – that needed to be arranged. The first few shapes fit together nicely, with new pieces, every so often, tacked on neatly to eventually form a rectangle. But then, Williams introduced two oddly shaped pieces that didn’t extend the rectangle – they hung off or down and seemed out of place. Only when Williams rearranged the original pieces was he able to make a large, perfect square.

“Are we content or are we actively seeking better recipes?” Williams asked. “Growth in the promo products industry in the next generation is going to come from better recipes and not more cooking. It’s about attitude as much as anything else.”