James Gardner left his bank job a few weeks ago to work for the DWP. It may be my imagination but it seems his blogging has become spunkier since then. I like his latest post about some tired conventional wisdom about making money from ideas. A couple of snippets that caught my eye:
One comment from a particular individual struck me. He was saying that he sees a lot of start-ups who have no IP nothing at all they can protect. Nothing in fact, that makes their idea valuable. “They are interesting ideas for a websites”, I think he said…Never have I heard a more telling statement from the old school. The ones who think that building new technology – technology that can be protected with patents and then licensed – is the only way to build successful businesses.
James goes on to cites lots of examples of successful enterprises that seem fairly light on IP. Then he has an entertaining pop at the fetishisation of business models and monetisation. Highlights:
The argument here, from the same individual, was that so many “nice web sites” didn’t have any clue how to monetise themselves. Apparently, this is a cardinal sin. Firstly, I’d suggest that anyone that’s worked for a large corporate has no clue how to monetise anything. Big successful corporations got that way because of clever people at the start. Once the model is in place, the product developed, and the users recruited, what’s left? Yes, operations.
