Some of the issues facing our industry seem to be the business model used. The typical graphic arts company operates hierarchically, with a top-down structure. It is very difficult to innovate within the confines of this model because the people making decisions about resources can be a bottleneck. I recently visited a successful large company who takes a different approach. They implement the hub-and-spoke business model. A derivative of the IT world, this is where the central (hub) maintains strategic control and operations are pushed to business units (spokes). Resource allocation is important here; the hub must make funds available to spokes so that innovation can occur locally. An even more interesting model is the Dandelion (or multiple hub-and-spoke), where each spoke also has an additional center of it's own. This is a common model to very large multinationals (like HP for example) who have the resources to operate the spokes almost autonomously from one another. There are of course drawbacks to this approach, such as doubling up of resources. Nevertheless, it seems that one key learning opportunity we have in print is taking ideas to market much faster, and these types of models do this well. Remembering however that no matter how you structure your team, the players still have to be good at what they do.
In this issue we talk about wide-format inkjet technology. This is a great innovation in our industry; the question is, if you invest, what type of business model will you use to exploit the opportunities?
