Mary Panttaja

A Thought Meander on New Business Model Opportunities

I have spent the last few months studying new business models, new technology, what’s happening, who’s happening. There seems to be a lot of turmoil, a lot of thrash and crash, and also a lot of steady business and technology development.

As someone who is in the midst, as always, of figuring out what wants to happen next in my life, I look on curiously to see what can apply to my situation. What can I leverage? Where can I contribute?

In my previous business endeavors, I essentially used one key skill to build a career and a company. I could learn new technologies fairly quickly and see how to leverage them in a structured fashion. My husband and I built our first consulting company by always being the earliest adopter on the block—after carefully picking the right adoptee. It was the only way a small consulting company could stay ahead of the Andersons, as it were.

So now I’m looking at what’s happening with an eye to see if there is any place for me in this dynamically changing environment, and if so, what would the opportunity look like?

One thing I see is that the new wave of extraordinary technological capabilities has enabled some incredible ideas to come to fruition. Some of them are potent, and some of them are, well, a little dorky. (There are many directions to go with these observations, many of which have been covered. Read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson for one discussion of why technology has made the world a new place. Read Tim O’Reilly and his gang, who write on many of these opportunities.)

What’s new? Well,

• Tools are better and enable you to design and build anything more quickly.
  We have a world-wide delivery system. And it’s instant for digital products, like music, books, software.
• We have a world-communication system. You can have a conference call with any group of people distributed almost anywhere in the world.
• We have a world marketing platform that enables you to talk with your customers all day long from your bedroom.
• This is not to mention the very new things that you can build with the current technologies.

The major point for me is that suddenly you can do more with much, much less that was ever possible. And that turns out to be critical for maximizing the potential of a young organization.

(Remember the heady days at the end of the century when HR was hiring so many people per day that it was frightening? Turns out we were right to be very afraid.)

More (with less) tomorrow.