Reports of your death are greatly exaggerated

By Matt Cooney, November 1, 2010 @ 11:08 am

I was probably a bit of a killjoy to Vaughan Rowsell last year. We were both flying out of Wellington following the Webstock conference when he told me he was building Vend, a web-based system for small retailers to manage their transactions. I groaned, imagining his target market: cash-strapped, risk-averse, and already well-served by incumbents with big sales teams.

Rowsell, of course, knew a lot more about his venture than I did—including the rather obvious fact that small Kiwi retailers are a lot more innovative and knowledgeable than I was giving them credit for. And those incumbents? They’re the reason he likes the odds of Vend succeeding. Incumbents get tired. Their products start to show their age. Their innovators move on. And they don’t realise they’re vulnerable until it’s too late.

Vend is out to disrupt their business; first, by bringing point-of-sale into the age of the web, and then into Web 2.0, social networks and the cloud. Rowsell’s story is on page 22.

Phillip Mills could easily be considered one of those incumbents, but he’s awake to the risks. His business, Les Mills International, sets the agenda for gyms and health clubs all over the world. But that means there’s no point in innovating if you can’t take the industry with you, so LMI is involving its customers, their non-customers and even their competitors in its thinking. If anyone is going to disrupt their industry, it’ll most likely by them. At the least, as Anya Kussler reports on page 86, they won’t be caught looking the other way.

But surely no industry is being disrupted more publicly than our own. It’s a great time to be part of a small, growing company; Condé Nast, not so much. But even Gourmet, the iconic 70-year-old US food and wine magazine that Condé Nast closed late last year, has been reborn as an intriguing iPad publication that utilises elements of game theory. Sometimes the best way to deal with surprise is to surprise yourself.