With all of the publicity around insurance or legal referral fees earlier in the year it won’t surprise many people that the insurance industry is one of the largest spenders on legal services in the UK, about £5Bn pa, 20% of the market. Unless you’re in the legal services industry though it’s likely that the…
I listened to an interesting interview recently about a new service which brings airline style ticket pricing to restaurant booking. We are all used to seeing the cost of an airline ticket fluctuating with demand. What is going on in the background in simple terms is that the airline, with a fixed supply (i.e. number of seats), …
There have been many column inches spent over the last week discussing General Motor’s decision to move from an outsourced model to an insourced model in relation to its IT. What drives much of the debate is the skills agenda and can GM manage the transition. If you look at the reasons that GM gave…
The UK has some great institutions which are often the envy of the rest of the world, the BBC, the Royal Mail, and the National Health Service. Sometimes as a nation we are too busy competing them to within an inch of their existence to see what we have in them. Taking the Royal Mail,…
Inventions can happen anywhere, to anyone, and at any time. At some point during everyone’s life they will come up with something that could be categorised as new and novel and an invention. When you then look at inventions and overlay what happens to them, how far they are then innovated, you can probably categorise…
We are constantly reminded that we live in an increasingly connected world. If you believe the projections with regards to the number of devices connected to the internet then it will increase from just under 2bn today to over 5bn by 2014. A more than doubling in two years. In terms of business models, the…
“Agility” is a much written about topic. If you do a search in Amazon in “agility” it lists 18,000+ books written on the subject. Admittedly most of the top 10 relate to “dog training” and are nothing to do with commercial agility. Interestingly, I struggled to find too many books on “commercial agility” and most…
In this cost conscious age many organisations are looking for ways to maintain margins by managing their cost base. When they look around for low hanging fruit they see the opportunities opened up by the increasingly connected world and the changes in people’s willingness to do themselves, what others have done for them before. The…
Back in the early ’90s I happened to do a piece of research in relation to the UK government’s intention to award mobile phone wireless spectrum and accompanying PCN licences. At that time there were two mobile phone incumbents, Cellnet (now O2) and Vodafone, who both had licences and operated on the GSM network at…
If we look at business models in the last century then the major innovation was the introduction by the Ford Motor Company of the assembly line. The approach created competitive advantage through efficiency and since this breakthrough in Detroit which began operation on 1st December 1913 many people have embellished and adapted it to further refine it. For…