Tinkering with MoDeLs

Wayne Gretzky, the best hockey player ever, said "a good player skates to where the puck is, a great player skates to where the puck will be."
In the Managerial Eco classes at Rotman, we tend to accept scarcity of resources by default. This helps : a) create generic economic models and b) simplify supply-demand functions. With the communication/info revolution, there is a shift, where tech innovation allows moving from scarcity to abundance.



History is filled with examples of things that were once special, expensive and sought after, but are now seen as just another commodity. From air travel to televisions to mobile phones to personal computers, value diminishes with  improvements, breakthroughs and economies of scale.


Now, more than ever, winning is about innovation and altering the model - tinkering with available models and coming up with new integrative models - redefining the game so that it favors your "home-field advantage" vs. anyone else's.

For instance, one approach is to lower the price and make it up in volume (examples include Walmart, Costco etc.). Infosys brought the flat world model, where any work is disaggregated and moved to the lowest cost, highest quality location. Recently, the game of cricket got a shorter version- IPL or the Indian Premier League, which now has huge fan following and admen queuing up for space. Google brought all information in the world to a search engine for free by turning the end-user into the product and the advertiser into the customer:

All these models show Einstein-like brilliance- so simple, yet nobody ever thinks about them.

The beauty of remodelling is that it holds immense possibilities. There is enough room for a thousand flowers to bloom!