We are less than four months away from drupa and the atmosphere in the graphic arts industry seems to be quite mixed. There has been considerable bad news recently with companies downsizing, restructuring, or shutting their doors completely. At the same time, others are investing in new technology and generally everyone seems to be excited about drupa! If you broadly observe the landscape you may notice that the companies who are currently succeeding are mid-sized, or they are large companies working in smaller teams. If we think of organizations as teams, this inherently makes sense; there is a sweet spot for the number of players you want and need. The hope is that the restructuring currently taking place will return the playing field to an optimal number of resources needed to “win the game”.
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?