Modelling An Innovation Paradigm Shift from Harvard Business School

This paper from Harvard Business School assesses the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single user individuals or firms, and open collaborative innovation projects. It analyzes the design costs and architectures and communication costs associated with each model. The paper concludes that innovation by individual users and also open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with—and may displace—producer innovation in many parts of the economy. The authors argue that a transition from producer innovation to open single user and open collaborative innovation is desirable in terms of social welfare, and so worthy of support by policymakers.

Content is No Longer King

Stephen Shapiro is a business writer who has earnt a living in the traditional manner associated with consultants. He has written two books to support his innovation consultancy. No difference to the norm here! However his blog "Content is No Longer King" is about his journey of discovery seeking to understand who makes profits from his writing now Amazon's Kindle threatens to revolutionise book publishing and distribution by taking his books on-line. Shapiro demonstrates clearly in this article that we are repeating the business models of old - business models stretching back to the turn of the 20th century to the Tin Pan Alley days when popular sheet music was first introduced to the masses. The profit takers in those days were the entrepreneur distributors who travelled door to door selling the sheet music - not the songwriters. The only difference now is the distribution method rather than being human is on-line and once it gets on-line there is almost no cost to the distributor!!

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10 Business Models to Monetise Web Applications

During my morning reading, The Long Tail had a link to a survey of Web app business models. If you take a look at the charts listing the revenue models, you will see there are twenty models listed. However, that is not an exhaustive list of ways to make money. Some of the models, such as Fixed and Variable Subscriptions, have several "implementations" that you can attempt. Having said this, why is it that monetization is so hard for many Web 2.0 applications? Let's look at what needs to be done to support the various business models.

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