Today we find ourselves in an era of “unscale,” where small businesses and entrepreneurs can successfully compete with far larger competitors, as Hemut Taneja of General Catalyst wrote last year in the Harvard Business Review. source: Fortune: How the Internet is giving Small Business Saturday an edge
Economies of Unscale: Why Business Has Never Been Easier for the Little Guy:
"... A series of breakthrough technologies and new business models are destroying the old rule that bigger is better. By exploiting the vast (but cheap) audience afforded by the Internet, and taking advantage of a host of modular services, small becomes the new big. The global business environment is decomposing into smaller yet more profitable markets, so businesses can no longer rely on scaling up to compete, but must instead embrace a new economies of unscale... Unscaling has emerged over decades. FedEx offered overnight delivery services in the 1970s, letting anyone ship a product anywhere, fast, at a modest cost. Around the same time, Chinese companies like Foxconn were developing less expensive approaches to manufacturing, and opening those facilities up to product designers across the globe. These two changes alone allow a lone innovator in Austin to build a world class product in China and ship it to Berlin — and that’s a revolution for someone with a good idea. Two decades later, Amazon and eBay launched online marketplaces that allowed small businesses to sell their goods to global consumers, creating enormous marketing power even for the little guy. However, like an orchestra missing several of its musicians, these platforms did not offer the complete ensemble needed for small businesses to compete effectively.... new economies of unscale will be good for job growth, because they open up thousands of new market niches for exploitation. By buying specialized services, in customized form and at modest cost, companies can create unique products, find buyers from across the world, and secure profits. It doesn’t matter if a designer wants to build polka dot bird feeders — there is a hyper-niche market they can tap, using platforms like Etsy to sell it across the world. To succeed though, we first have to unlearn what we have been taught about business: We have to think in an unscaled mindset, where the emphasis is on a greater number of specialized products sold to customers who know exactly what they need. How we train our students for this world will be critical to securing their future employment...." (read more at links above)
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