Innovation – A bare necessity

Business model innovation is a topic that most businesses and industries have been grappling with since the rise and growth of all things digital – e-commerce platforms, mobile consumption, or social engagement to name just a few. In its most basic form, business model innovation is the development of new, unique products and services to support and grow an organisation’s financial viability and the steps or processes necessary to deliver on these products and services for sustainable future growth.

In the book industry we have also been contending with how to stay relevant to our customers in a changing digital market environment. Concepts such as the long tail theory, free content, repurposed content, micro publishing and e-publishing have resulted in the traditional book industry having to rethink its value-chain and its value proposition. We are all aware of the highstakes at play when as book businesses we do not enter into the digital realm with a certain degree of success. In some instances these efforts result in marginal success for the organization and/or its customers. In other instances we fail miserably. But this is the nature of innovation – the ability to take calculated risks, assess and measure our success and failures and eventually move on and try something new.

In South Africa in particular we have a mobile market. What does this mean? According to the Mobile Africa 2015 study conducted by GeoPoll* and World Wide Worx, Internet browsing via phones now stands at 40% across the markets in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda. The report further lists the most common mobile activities for South Africans as sending SMS (52%), taking photos (45%) and browsing the Internet (40%). From the 2015 Effective Measures** report South Africans use the Internet for e-mail (88.39%), banking (65.60%), research/ obtaining information (62.32%) and reading news/magazines/articles online (60.27%). How does this impact the book publishing industry and trade? Well, on the one hand as producers and retailers of content we are competing for our potential customer’s attention on these devices, whether for entertainment, educational purposes or for general information. Secondly, the Internet allows for a vast number of opportunities to deliver content, any kind of content, that is relevant to consumers. Taking a very simple approach to this data, it might be worthwhile to investigate opportunities to deliver relevant and quality content via SMS or through an email subscription service. If Google is the biggest publisher and aggregator of content in the world, how do we make our content, whether book blurbs or online reading communities, searchable and findable?

Let’s consider an important mobile product for a moment. According to Google an App is “a self-contained program or piece of software designed to fulfil a particular purpose; an application, especially as downloaded by a user to a mobile device.” We all download Apps for various purposes; to check the weather when we are travelling, to read a book, to connect with old friends on social media or to measure our fitness and calorie intake. But the technology that delivers Apps is changing faster than the software behind Apps. How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables (e.g. Apple Watch) – is undergoing a dramatic change. Apps as independent destinations will become less important in 2016 as we see them evolving as a publishing tool with related notifications that contain content and actions. The content may be reformatted to enable more natural user input and optimised for every individual’s unique situation. So the book I read in my mobibook App will become an email to my friend who is at her desk at work with snippets of the best quotes that I enjoyed from the book. Delivery of content, irrespective of context and customized entirely.

These developments allow for business model innovation even at the most basic level. When we fail to innovate the business model we fail to stay relevant to our customers. There is perhaps no more relevant example than the recent notice on Friday 23 October 2015 that local social network Mxit is shutting down its commercial operations. Their monthly active user base has been steadily dwindling since 2013 amid intense competition from international rivals such as WhatsApp and Facebook. But perhaps their biggest error was the inability to recognise the fast pace at which cheap smartphones would penetrate the mobile market. Mxit was originally developed as a feature phone tool and despite some attempts from the Mxit team to develop a quality smartphone application, they were unable to stay abreast of these fast changing trends and innovate their business model in a timely fashion.

The only constant is change, and fastpaced change. It is necessary for book businesses to include opportunities for their teams to occasionally brainstorm and reflect on how their business model might need to innovate at any time to remain relevant and useful.

– Rhodé Odendaal