Many successful organisations have grown through exploring new routes to market, for instance, expanding into new geographies, selling through third parties, or creating strategic alliances. New business models, in particular, doing business on-line, have also proved to be very beneficial when seeking growth.
The technology sector, like many other sectors before it, often sells through third parties (resellers). When the motor industry started out, their route to market was an ever growing dealer network (garages as we used to call them). This third–party approach has many advantages, mainly the speed in which they are able to scale their business, so more resellers in more geographies would be considered to be new routes to market.
New business models might include cutting out the middle-man, and the associated cost, allowing the customer to transact with you on-line, and without human intervention. I started out by buying records in a record shop; today I pre-order on iTunes and the product appears on all my devices the day it’s released. Once upon a time organisations built their own IT infrastructure; now they consume in the cloud. Both new routes to market and business models. I do miss browsing through records in a record shop, but that’s progress.