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The traditional innovation process - consisting of a funnel coupled with project screening - suffers from several practical shortcomings and flaws. Overemphasis on the role of early stages, such as idea generation, overshadows subsequent phases of equal importance. The drive to feed as many ideas as possible into the funnel may cause congestion that slows down overall progress. Furthermore, the yield may be of low quality if ineffective gates allow too many infertile ideas to pass through the funnel. Processes may be inflexible and slow to react, especially if tied to the corporate planning calendar as often proposed. This is not to imply that these problems are inherent; they are instead the consequences of poor practices.

The authors discuss the disadvantages and suggest an alternative to overcome them. The proposed approach is driven by strategic business options and also introduces additional benefits. It produces savings in sunk costs and prematurely tied-up capital. It contributes to effective and economical use of resources, because a company commits irrevocably to only one step at a time. Lastly, options enable, and by their very nature even demand, active and adaptive management.

The authors present the elements constituting an advantageous business model, and suggest how to achieve that competitive edge. They argue that traditional innovation processes with funnelling front-end, stage-gate with go/kill decisions, and similar processes have inherent limitations in such an inclusive concept. They propose an alternative approach, driven by strategic business options. A business model, like everything else, has a limited life span. Anew model requires radical changes in thinking and logics. Still, the move is not easy, and most attempts will fail. The right timing is tricky, plans to abandon an existing model might feel dispiriting, and the necessity to change can be blinded by past successes. This article discusses these complex aspects and the steps needed to overcome them. Finally, in ever-changing business competition it is not realistic to constantly renew inside-out. Instead, for a company to survive, its business model must have a very important quality known as resilience. This article is based on the authors' extensive practical experience in a global business environment, as well as on their academic work.

There is still no universal definition of the third sector in Europe, but it can be seen as including all types of non-governmental not-for-profit entities such as non-profit organizations, mutuals, cooperatives, social enterprises and foundations. This article attempts to make sense of the current shifting conceptualization of the third sector in Europe. It is based on short country summaries of the images and concepts of the third sector in 13 European countries by EMES Network’s members, first presented in 2008 (Defourny and Pestoff, 2008; nine of them were recently revised and are found in the appendix to this article.). The perception and development of the third sector in Europe is closely related to the other major social governance institutions/mechanisms, like the market, state and community and through the third sector’s interaction with them. Moreover, many third sector organizations (TSOs) overlap with these other social institutions, resulting in varying degrees of hybridity and internal tensions experienced by them. TSOs can generate resources from their activities on the market, by providing services in partnership with the state and/or by promoting the interests of a given community or group. The country overviews document a growing professionalization of TSOs in most countries and a growing dependency of public funds to provide services. This has important theoretical and practical implications for orienting the articles included in this book. Thus, it can provide a key for better understanding the discussion and analysis in the remainder of this volume.