I’m thrilled to be heading to New York for this year’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference. I’ll be presenting along with Michael Smith of Worldreader in a session called “Disruptive Innovations In Emerging Markets: Mxit, Siyavula, Paperight and Worldreader“.
Here is an excerpt from my notes for the talk.
I think the real challenge for publishing is to appeal to new markets of young people in places where there are no bookstores or libraries or electronics stores or affordable Internet data. The size of the markets we’ve been selling to for the last hundred years are a drop in the ocean compared to this audience. Most are in developing countries.
We have to introduce completely new value propositions for these markets. A value proposition means: what do you get for how much money and in what way?
Clayton Christensen explained in The Innovator’s Dilemma fifteen years ago why it’s extremely difficult for established companies to create new value propositions. Often, the only way to do it is through acquisition or by spinning out entirely independent business units that can experiment freely and fail with confidence.
So the most promising innovations are most likely going to come from small players, who are able to grow in emerging markets with low margins.
No market needs a new value proposition more than the poor in developing countries, like the forty million people in South Africa who’ve likely never bought a book, but who all have a mobile phone and limited access to data. There is today simply no compelling reason for them to buy a printed book or an ebook given current prices and processes.
Three South African platforms in particular are tackling low literacy and book-purchasing rates in this market by changing the traditional publishing value proposition:
1. The first is a family of projects publishing stories on mobile phone app Mxit;
2. the second integrates textbooks with online media optimised for phones; and
3. the third is my own project, helping the ubiquitous photocopy shop legally print books out anywhere.
