Leaders often fail to recognize the underlying facts that will transform their markets, which creates opportunities for disruptors who work 24/7/365 for a share of the leader’s business. The economy’s move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age created three new facts that leaders must heed. Let me use newspapers as an example of an industry that ignored facts at its peril. FACT: Digital technology allows the creation of the same benefits at a lower cost. All markets evolve to the lowest cost solution, period. So it’s no surprise that the lower-cost way of communicating information is dominating media markets. But newspapers did not heed the call. The Internet has demolished printing presses and scale economies as a barrier to entry into both sides of the newspaper business model (information for readers and an audience for advertisers), with new entrants offering opportunities…
Curators: A growing business model opportunity
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the volume of information, options and messages bombarding your daily life, you are not alone. Enter the curator – a role that I believe will become even more dominant in the decades ahead, creating opportunities for individuals and companies alike. The term curator has traditionally been associated with the experts working at museums who bring together the right collection of pieces to convey new insights into a subject, be it an art movement or geological period. Normally, seeing a part versus the whole of something reduces our understanding. Who would envision an elephant from a tusk? The genius of museum curators rests in their ability to select, from an entire body of work, the right subset to deepen the audience’s understanding of both the part and the whole. There are many other types of curators all around…
Product-Service Business Model Best Practices
I had occasion this week to look through a number of business-to-business manufacturers’ websites and noted the growing role of services in company offerings. Some services link directly to the products (e.g., financing or warranty services). Others are complementary – e.g., “buy our power generation products and our service team will help you minimize your carbon footprint.” The additions of services to products make sense in a world where products are increasingly commoditized by excess global supply, growing customer power and a flood of copycat offerings. More and more of these services are must-have additions to a product line because customers have come to expect them. And that means product manufacturers best not remain stuck in product-centric business models. Furthermore, because its getting harder to differentiate individual services, product manufacturers best be savvy in how they add services. There are two myths associated…
How Einstein would solve the physician shortage problem
Einstein argued that a problem will never be solved with the same mindset that created it. His thinking is sorely needed to address an emerging physician shortfall. The predicted shortage arises from a number of forces: According to a recent NYT article, “The number of training positions for medical school graduates is lagging. Younger doctors are on average working fewer hours than their predecessors. And about a third of the country’s doctors are 55 or older, and nearing retirement.” An aging baby boom generation will need more care. Our increasingly unhealthy population, with half of US adults having some kind of chronic condition, needs more care. The supply chain for producing US-trained physicians is expensive and restricted. Federal health care reform will make prevention and early treatment available to more people, adding up to 300,000 more patients into the primary care funnel. The…