Business Models - Trade Magazines

Over the last few decades, the magazine industry has seen huge fragmentation as readers are looking for more specialized magazines. There was a time people read a sports magazine. Today, people want to read about snowboarding, or even snowboarding in the rockies. Trade magazines are caught between a market that is looking for very specialised information with low circulation but very valuable eyeballs, and a mass market with low resonance with readers. Magazines in general suffer from a business model where in the short run, they lose money as more copies are sold, as the printing cost exceeds the revenue from the individual copy. Advertising makes up much of the revenues. So as more specialized magazines spring up, the generalist (rather the not-so-specialist) is caught in a vicious circle of falling circulation leading to lower advertising rates leading to fewer journalists leading to weaker content. So how does one respond ?

Business Models - Industry Services

A well developed industry usually has a surrounding set of specialist organisations dedicated to providing services to members of the industry as a neutral provider. Some obvious examples are trade associations and trade magazines. The range of services that can be provided is rather large. While few of these will have the scale to go IPO or any such ambitious thing, if they are well run, they can provide significant profits to their owners, typically individuals. It is rather puzzling that many more of these kinds of organisations do not exist in India. Perhaps there is not enough appreciation of the business model or how to leverage off of it.

The Universal Identification Number

The UIN project is one of the elements of "Soft Infrastructure" that Governments all over the world provide. I will describe some other aspects of Soft Infrastructure in a later post. In this post, I'll concentrate on the not so obvious fall-outs of the UIN project. Firstly, the UIN will allow individuals to be tracked, and as an extension, make it easier to enforce contracts or penalize infringements of laws. This will make India a more law abiding nation. Secondly, the UIN may reverse the gradual process of dis-enfranchisement that has been taking place in India. And finally, the UIN may provide a model by which the upper & upper middle classes of India can engage in the process of Governance.

Active Learning

I have worked with a variety of people in many organizations. As consultant, I work with many more. It continues to amaze me how few people use the vast resources of the internet, books and trade magazines to identify their problems and possible solutions.

There is always a minority of individuals who are active seekers of problems and their solution. The vast majority seem to be happy struggling with their problems and experimenting from scratch. Almost as if they are completely unique. Its a big waste of time and resources to reinvent the wheel. In many cases, people are completely unaware that a better solution exists, and which is being actively advertised in the trade magazine.

Sweating the small stuff - an idea whose time has come

Take a look at this TED talk.

I remember at my last corporate job, as CFO, being frustrated with the User Interface of the applications we expected our employees to use. The stand-out example was the "Change Control System" - if you needed access to a website that was blocked, you needed to fill out a request. In that form, you had to fill in a field for something like "by when do you want this done?"

And there were these lovely drop-down lists. For date : 1-31; Month: 1-12; Year: 2000-2099; and I kid you not, Hours; Minutes; and Seconds as well had to be specified. And there were no defaults. So everyone who wanted access to a website, had to get into these six drop down lists and select the exact date and time to the second when he wanted this change to happen.

Get a Chief Detail Officer. Or as David Pogue recounts at another TED talk, get a "Tap Counter"

Business idea in Design

Do we need Design Commercialisation Houses ? As I look around the internet for sociall relevant designs (a great starting place is Inhabitat), I come across all kinds of innovative and brilliant products for problems people face in many parts of the world. Take this washing machine for example. Or look at Open Source Architecture. Or even the National Innovation Foundation. Yet I meet a lot of designers trying to create new solutions to the same issues, when existing radical improvements are available but not widespread. 

My sense is that there is a big business niche for people to take existing design and adapt it for a particular client or market situation, with the clear intent of making it successful (large market, profitable). There are a few firms that do this. Swiss firm Vestergaard Frandsen is one such firm. Surely the market needs many more firm of these firms. Maybe NID and IIMA should join hands to incubate these firms to help design and innovation get firmer commercial roots.

Are you asking the right question

Ask the right question to get the right answer. One of my professors really brought home the overriding importance of asking the right question. It was a course on simulating complex systems. We were discussing a simulation of lifts in a multistorey building ... people arrive at different times on different floors, needing to go to different floors. There was a lot of people waiting for a lift on the ground floor. How do you optimize this system (minimize wait times or total transit times) would be the obvious question, and detailed simulations of different configurations would help reduce the wait or transit times. However, someone else looking at the problem actually decided that the issue was boredom while waiting. Their solution was to put a TV in the lobby.