I read something the other day about how there are less than a dozen or so movie studios in the USA that employ over 1000 folks. Yet, as an industry, it adds a huge $180 billion per year to the US economy. Over 2.4 million folks earn their living working in this industry. So where are all the folks employed?
To make a movie is an interesting study of collaboration. Basically, it is a giant project that stems from an idea. Money is found to produce the film and then a wide variety of small companies (averaging about 8 employees each) that specialize in the needed niches to make a move are brought together to take the idea and make it into a reality. A finished movie. When the movie is done, the project is over and all the small companies go on to another project (movie). It is the ultimate model for getting something done and I believe it represents the future of how business will be done. It is already happening now.
Think about it. As an entrepreneur, you can have an idea for a product and without making any investment in people, manufacturing facilities or other assets, go from idea to finished product in fairly short order. You can go to elance.com to find someone to design your product. You can also find someone on there to create your logo, collateral materials and ecommerce website. Or, you can do it yourself with a platform like shopify.com.
All of your production can be outsourced to a third party. Since there is a global over supply of manufacturing, you can easily and quickly find a supplier to help you create your product. And you don’t even have to ship it… you can get Amazon.com to handle all the logistics for you. And there a bunch of fulfillment houses out there as well so even this is ultra-competitive.
Want to see this in action with a real product that was launched in 5 months (and I think it could have been done much quicker)? Then check out this link -
http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/2794775825/idea-to-market-in-5-months-making-the-glif
In the coming year, I am going to experiment with this model more than I have in the past. And one of the things that strikes me as amazing about this concept, is that it places an important amount of value on the idea. The idea in this model has the potential to retain much of its value without the ideator getting lost in the minutia of execution.
