Book excerpt: Learn how the most successful businesses are creating value and igniting smart growth in a fast-paced, competitive market. Most businesses today focus on competition and disruption instead of collaboration, participation, and engagement. They focus on transactions instead of interactions. They seek to optimize or extract value rather than share it. They build assets and thrive on enormous scale, huge distribution networks, and brand recognition. But then along comes a rival that doesn't care much about your brand and your other assets, and it either rushes past you or mows you down. In The Interaction Field, management expert and professor Erich Joachimsthaler explains that the only way to thrive in this environment is through the Interaction Field model. Companies who embrace this model generate, facilitate, and benefit from data exchanges among multiple people and groups -- from customers and stakeholders, but also from those you wouldn't expect to be in the mix, like suppliers, software developers, regulators, and even competitors. And everyone in the field works together to solve big, industry-wide, or complex and unpredictable societal problems. The future is going to be about creating value for everyone. Businesses that solve immediate challenges of people today and also the major social and economic challenges of the future are the ones that will survive and grow.