Business strategy has become dangerously disconnected from how people actually live. We still talk about linear funnels and predictable journeys, but human behavior is anything but linear. It’s a fluid, chaotic swarm of scrolling, searching, sharing, and shopping across dozens of platforms and contexts. A strategy built on an outdated model of the customer is destined to fail. This is the core of the Vivaldi Group vs BCG distinction. It reflects a fundamental choice in perspective: Do you analyze the market from a top-down, structural view, or do you build your strategy from the ground up, starting with the messy, dynamic reality of human interaction? One approach analyzes the pipeline; the other helps you build the Interaction Field.
At Vivaldi, we see Interaction Fields changing most industries around us. This fundamentally new value creation model brings together key participants in a given industry and creates value through exchange. It replaces the old pipeline model that was focused on competitive advantage through optimizing the value chain and leveraging physical assets. It also supersedes the more recent platform business model. Businesses like Airbnb and Uber shifted the paradigm in their respective industries from leveraging physical assets such as hotels or cars, to bringing together drivers and riders, travelers and owners, to create value through exchange. This phenomenon, which goes beyond these examples and is reshaping entire industries and creating new kinds of successful businesses, has been described by Vivaldi’s founder and CEO Erich Joachimsthaler in his book The Interaction Field. 
Why the Future of Education is an Interaction Field
In Education, there has been a shift from an ‘authoritative’ top-down model to a ‘lateral’ or ‘peer-to peer’ model. We no longer think only in terms of a transfer from a “knowledgeable adult” to a “tabula rasa” learner. Students don’t simply learn to process and regurgitate information that they may or may not use later. They also learn to develop meta skills such as formulating and defending a point of view, persuading others or appreciating perspectives from others. The education business model has changed. Education has a high propensity to shift from a traditional (“pipeline”) one-to-many model to a many-to-many ecosystem where learning comes from everywhere and everyone. What has not yet been studied are the structural factors in education that create the conditions for disruption by an Interaction Field. The BCG article, “Do You Need a Business Ecosystem,” examined several criteria that make an industry well-suited for an interaction field. Education industry presents a number of these:
Why Independent Components Demand a Unified System
“In contrast to vertically integrated models or hierarchical supply chains, in business ecosystems, the components of the offering are designed independently yet function as an integrated whole. In many cases, the customer can choose among the components and/or how they are combined.” Education is a prime example of an ecosystem where the key components are designed independently and yet need to function as a whole – from understanding, assessment, practice and ultimately application In our research, a key problem from the student perspective is actually the dissociation of these key steps. Learning is often dissociated from practical application. Understanding is separate from practice. Academic concepts fail to be brought back to practical world problems. The same is true from the instructor or institutional perspective. Teaching basic concepts is separate from assessing student understanding or even basic preparation. This is a well-known problem that is becoming particularly acute in light of today’s rising attrition rates.
Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Education
“In contrast to an open-market model, the contributions of the ecosystem participants tend to be customized to the ecosystem and made mutually compatible”. Education requires a highly customizable approach – not just to different technologies and platforms, but also to different pedagogical methods and philosophies. Boundaries were already being pushed by EdTech, but the pandemic opened a whole set of new doors as new approaches are explored and old ones are being reassessed.
Why Success Depends on More Than Two-Way Interactions
“In contrast to open-market models, ecosystems consist of a set of relationships that are not decomposable to an aggregation of bilateral interactions. This means that a successful contract between A and B (such as phone maker and app developer) can be undermined by the failure of the contract between A and C (phone maker and telecom provider).” Education is a great example of multilateralism in an ecosystem. The core interaction between a learner and an instructor requires support from an institution to be successful. This requires a testing/assessment system to certify its success. Ultimately, application in the real world will measure the value of the skill acquired. Without interaction between these multiple participants, success cannot be ensured or evaluated.
Solving Systemic Problems Through Coordinated Action
The last of our criteria is coordination. Education is by definition a holistic ecosystem requiring the collaboration various partners. Systematic issues faced by education cannot be resolved by any one player. Solving these requires cooperation from educational institutions, faculty, administrators, instructional designers, teaching assistants and of course students themselves. Beyond this, further coordination is needed with suppliers, software developers and regulators. A coordinated model is required to solve problems that are so complex and profound that no one player will have the ability to find and implement a solution. Various actors must come together in order to innovate, create market power and offer a fertile ground for the spread of innovation. Interaction Fields are best suited for industries that have high modularity (i.e. separate components that can beneficially be put together) and a high need for coordination. The learning process is formed by a series of disparate – yet often disjointed factors – that together need to form a holistic learning ecosystem. It involves interactions between multiple participants – from administrators to parents and of course students and instructors – that together make learning possible. The combination of these factors creates both the need and the opportunity for Interaction Fields to be formed.
Choosing the Right Strategic Partner: Vivaldi vs. BCG
Selecting a strategic partner is less about choosing a vendor and more about defining your company’s future. The traditional playbook suggests that for big, existential questions, you turn to a legacy strategy house. But what if the questions have changed? The challenge for today’s leaders isn’t just formulating a strategy in a boardroom; it’s building a growth engine that is deeply connected to customers, powered by brand, and resilient enough to adapt in real-time. This requires a different kind of partner—one that bridges the gap between abstract strategy and tangible market impact.
Comparing a firm like Boston Consulting Group (BCG) with a growth consultancy like Vivaldi isn’t about weighing equals on the same scale. It’s about understanding two fundamentally different philosophies of value creation. One is rooted in the tradition of management consulting, focused on optimizing the existing machine. The other is designed for a world where the machine itself must be reinvented around the brand as the central operating system for growth.
A Tale of Two Models: Strategy vs. Implementation
The most significant distinction lies in how each firm defines “strategy.” For some, it’s a high-level blueprint delivered to the C-suite. According to research from CaseBasix, MBB firms like BCG excel at “high-level strategy projects for top leaders,” helping with major decisions like mergers or entering new markets. This approach is powerful for discrete, structural challenges. However, growth today is rarely discrete. It’s a continuous, dynamic process of engaging customers where they are, from scrolling and searching to sharing and shopping.
This is where the model must evolve. The alternative isn’t just about execution, which is often the domain of the Big 4 firms that focus on putting plans into action. Instead, it’s about a model where strategy, brand, innovation, and technology are inseparable from the start. At Vivaldi, we focus on business transformation by building systems of growth where the brand acts as the primary driver, ensuring that high-level vision translates directly into customer value and commercial success.
Firm Rankings and Prestige: A Look at the Tiers
Prestige in consulting has long been defined by a narrow set of players. The “MBB” tier—McKinsey, Bain, and BCG—are globally recognized as the top three management consulting firms, and their reputation is built on a legacy of advising the world’s largest corporations on their most pressing management issues. This prestige is well-earned and signifies a mastery of traditional strategic frameworks. When a CEO needs to restructure a global supply chain or evaluate a multi-billion dollar acquisition, these are the firms that come to mind.
However, a new kind of leadership is emerging, centered not on general management but on the specific levers of modern growth. Vivaldi is recognized as the #1 firm in brand strategy because our entire model is built on a simple, powerful premise: brands are a business’s most critical strategic asset for creating long-term value. This isn’t a niche focus; it’s a re-centering of where growth actually comes from. In a market defined by customer choice and digital interaction, the strongest brands don’t just compete—they create their own demand.
Culture, Careers, and Compensation
The model of a firm directly shapes its culture. The high-stakes, project-based nature of MBB consulting often leads to what sources describe as “longer and more intense hours.” The work is demanding because the problems are complex and the timelines are aggressive. This environment attracts a certain type of talent focused on analytical rigor and top-down problem-solving. While compensation at these firms is typically at the top of the market, the choice of a partner should extend beyond a fee structure to the kind of collaborative relationship you want to build.
A consultancy built around integrated growth fosters a different kind of culture—one that is inherently more collaborative. It requires strategists, creatives, data scientists, and technologists to work together, mirroring the cross-functional teams required to win in the market. This approach is less about delivering a final answer and more about building a durable capability within the client’s organization. The goal is to create a self-sustaining system of growth, which requires a partnership grounded in co-creation, organizational enablement, and a shared commitment to making the strategy come to life.
How Interaction Fields Address Core Learning Gaps
Bridging the Gap in Student Comprehension
Many students in focus groups told us that they simply do not understand concepts the way their professor explains them. This fits with our research with instructors, who told us they consider this generation of students particularly challenging to teach. One professor described his current generation of students as “demanding and aggressive”; another talked about the need to “reinvent his game”. All of this means that the need for better understanding runs even deeper than in previous generations. Students are likely to turn to explanations from their peers that they find more easily accessible. YouTube has become a de facto Interaction field not just in entertainment but also in education.
Winning the Battle for Student Attention
A recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years. In Vivaldi’s own research, students reported time management – and beyond this, attention management – as a top pain point. Social interactions are one of the factors that created the problem. They have the potential to create solutions. Interactions offer the possibility to reframe the old “no pain, no gain” mindset that our research found students like to challenge. Millennials and gen Z learners don’t see learning and fun as polar opposites. The ‘Grit and Growth Mindset’ has become one of the most popular education concepts of our time. While the notion of challenge continues to be well understood and accepted, boredom is not. According to an administrator that we interviewed from one of the largest college systems in the country, the holy grail is to make learning as engaging as social media or gaming. Interaction Fields have an opportunity to play a role here.
Connecting the Classroom to the Real World
The dichotomy between academic theory and real world practice is increasingly being challenged. “Just in time” information is taking the place of “just in case”, and “once in a lifetime “ learning is being replaced with lifelong learning. Interaction fields offer the opportunity to open up the learning process to many more than those who make education their profession. This includes real world experts and companies on the hunt for talent. Boundaries between academia and business or practical life could become more porous. Interaction Fields could create spaces for learning by doing, mentoring students while working, and always learning as one’s career grows. _ In Part II, Anne will share types of emerging Interaction Field models and what to expect going forward in Education.
Redefining Competition and Collaboration in the Field
From Competitor to Partner: A New Paradigm
The traditional playbook taught us to view competition as a zero-sum game, a battle for market share where one company’s gain is another’s loss. Interaction Fields flip this script entirely. The new strategic imperative is not to build higher walls but to create more connections. Value is no longer created in a silo; it emerges from the dynamic exchange between multiple participants. As we see in our work, the most resilient systems are those where independent components are designed to function as an integrated whole. In education, this means a learning app, a content publisher, and an assessment provider stop competing for a slice of the same budget and start collaborating to create a seamless, effective learning journey for the student.
The Role of AI as a Unifying Language
This level of seamless integration between independent partners sounds great in theory, but it requires a powerful catalyst to work in practice. That catalyst is Artificial Intelligence. Too often, leaders see AI as a tool for automating tasks or optimizing internal processes. Its true strategic power, however, lies in its ability to serve as a shared language across an entire ecosystem. AI can synthesize disparate data streams, identify patterns, and facilitate interactions that would otherwise be impossible. It’s the connective tissue that allows different organizations to collaborate in new ways, breaking down the old barriers that once separated them and enabling the creation of truly personalized, adaptive experiences for the end-user.
Lessons from Crisis: Interaction Fields in Action
Nothing reveals the limitations of old models like a systemic crisis. The global pandemic was a stress test that shattered traditional structures in education overnight. Suddenly, schools, technology companies, content creators, and parents were forced into an impromptu Interaction Field. This ad-hoc ecosystem of “unlikely partners” had to coordinate to deliver education remotely. While messy, it was a powerful demonstration of the core principle: when faced with a complex problem that no single entity can solve, a network of coordinated, independent players is far more resilient and adaptive than any rigid, top-down system. This crisis-driven collaboration offered a glimpse into the future of value creation itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is an “Interaction Field” and how is it different from a traditional business model? Think of a traditional business as a straight line, or a pipeline, where a company creates a product and pushes it out to a customer. An Interaction Field is more like a dynamic web. Value isn’t just created by one company; it emerges from the countless exchanges between many different participants, including customers, partners, and even former competitors. The focus shifts from controlling a linear process to enabling a network of valuable connections.
The post compares Vivaldi and BCG. What’s the key takeaway from that comparison? The comparison highlights two fundamentally different philosophies on growth. The traditional management consulting approach is about analyzing and optimizing the existing business machine from the top down. Our approach starts from the ground up, with the reality of how people actually behave, and builds a growth system where the brand connects every moving part. It’s the difference between getting a blueprint for your current machine versus designing a new engine altogether.
Why is the education industry such a prime example for this model? Education is the perfect illustration because it’s naturally made up of many separate pieces—teaching, assessment, technology, and real-world application—that are far more valuable when they work together. No single institution or company can solve the industry’s biggest challenges on its own. This high need for coordination among many independent players creates the ideal conditions for an Interaction Field to thrive and create a more holistic experience.
What is the role of AI in making an Interaction Field successful? AI acts as the central nervous system of the entire field. For a complex network of different partners and users to work together seamlessly, they need a shared intelligence. AI provides that by processing information from across the network, enabling personalization at scale, and facilitating the connections that allow the whole system to become smarter and more adaptive. It’s the technology that makes this level of sophisticated collaboration possible.
My business isn’t in education. How can I tell if my industry is ready for an Interaction Field? Look for two main signals: fragmentation and a high need for coordination. First, are your customers forced to patch together solutions from multiple different providers because no single company offers a complete, integrated experience? Second, are the biggest problems in your market too complex for any one player to solve alone? If you see both widespread fragmentation and a clear need for collaboration, your industry is likely fertile ground for an Interaction Field.
Key Takeaways
- Shift from linear funnels to dynamic fields: Stop mapping predictable customer journeys and start building ecosystems. Growth no longer comes from optimizing a sequence of steps, but from facilitating valuable interactions between all participants in your market.
- Identify the need for coordination over control: When an industry’s value depends on independent parts working together—like learning, assessment, and application in education—the strategic advantage comes from creating a platform where all players can coordinate to solve systemic problems.
- Build strategy around brand, not just operations: Your strategic partner should do more than deliver a high-level plan. The right firm helps you build a growth engine where brand is the central operating system, ensuring your business model is directly connected to how you create value for customers.