Slowly but surely, we’re gathering up all the interesting bits and pieces left over from the Creative Business seminars in March. I have finally put up some of the printed materials that we used during the full-day seminar in PDF form, including the workbook, the cards for the Radiohead exercise, and the business models and markets exercise. These are all available under Creative Commons licence, and I shall have a look at the possibility of uploading a zip of the InDesign files so that people can re-mix them for local use.

The audio is hopefully coming soon, along with some more bit and pieces, including the A1 sheets from the Complements and Substitutes session. We have the full case studies up for Tom Reynolds and John Buckman, and just awaiting the final version from David Bausola.

We have also created a CBDE mailing list, which is open to anyone, whether they came to the seminars or not. We’re hoping people will discuss their ideas and thoughts about the use of open IP in business, so please do join us!

Wondering what’s going to be included in the Creative Business in the Digial Era Course? Well, we’re working on the wiki to pull together the relevant materials. It’s been difficult to narrow it down to the essentials, as there’s a lot of really interesting topics we can cover, but so far we have:

• An overview of Intellectual Property
• Digital distribution methods
• A social media primer
• The importance of community
• A look at business model archetypes

We’re working on polishing up the case studies too, and hopefully they’ll start coming online soon.
If this whets your appetite, then get your application form to us sharpish!

Michael and I have been beavering away on the wiki over the last several weeks, working on background materials and doing interviews for our case studies (which explains why the blog’s been a bit quiet!). One area that we need to examine more closely is existing thinking on business models. Michael found a great piece by Michael Rappa about business models on the web, which I’m going to have to carefully read and digest. He splits the business models down into nine types: brokerage, advertising, infomediary, merchant, manufacturer (direct), affiliate, community, subscription and utility.

A couple of weeks ago, Michael and I were talking to Magnatune’s John Buckman, a very experienced businessman, entrepreneur and innovator, (who also happens to be on ORG’s Advisory Council). We got to talking about how one could group business models types into a number of archetypes. This was the list we came up with:

The Loss Leader
You give away a creative work in order to earn money from a related good. The goods given away are non-substitutable for the goods sold, i.e. one is not the direct equivalent of the other. For example an ebook isn’t substitutable for a printed book, because at the moment, ebook readers are not an equivalent experience to reading a paper book.

Examples include:

• Giving away electronic copies of books in order to sell copies of printed books, e.g. Friday Publishing, Tom Reynolds, O’Reilly, Tor, Cory Doctorow, Penguin, Larry Lessig
• Giving away access to a web comic in order to sell T-shirts
• Giving away streams or low-grade downloads of music in order to sell CDs, live tickets, merch, syncs or high-grade downloads

Promotion of Same
You give away a creative work in order to sell more of that same creative work. The goods given away are directly substitutable for the goods you are selling, for example, music in digital format is substitutable for music on a CD, because music is often digitised from CD in order to be played on a digital music player, and if the fan wants a physical copy of the music on CD, then it is easy to burn one onto a writable CD.

Examples include:

• Giving away a digital version of an album and allowing fans to decide how much money they will pay for it, if any, and selling the CD.
• Giving away a digital version of a film whilst also selling the DVD.

Market Development
You provide free materials in order to develop the market to a point where your goods become in demand. You may be developing a niche market, e.g., for the music of your band, or a much broader market, e.g. interest in a new type of business consulting.

Examples include:

• A new band giving away live and recorded tracks to encourage interest, even before they have anything to sell. The classic examples here are bands now-popular, such as the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, who offered recordings to free to their fanbase before they signed a recording contract.
• A consultant giving away thought leadership articles to seed an idea, even before the market is ready to hire them.

Competitive Warfare
Giving away goods that your competitors sell, in order to undermine their business strategy. This certainly has been and is done in the software world. In the creative industries, one could interpret giving away ebooks as a way to undermine other authors (and some have indeed done this), but it’s unclear that that is a valid interpretation.

This practice emerged with open source software, and continues in Google’s battle with Microsoft for the hearts and wallets of global computer users, as the search giant offers consumers a free substitute for Microsoft’s lucrative Office package. Google’s Documents web app may not have all Office’s functions, but has other features and does not cost hundreds of pounds for a licence.

Commons-based Peer Production
A group of people come together to produce a work collectively, sharing responsibility and workload, and producing an end product that could not have been created by one person alone.

This refers to a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation. Benkler, who first defined the concept, compares it to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom) and market-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job).

Examples include:

• Peer-produced films.

What do you think of our list of archetypes? Are we missing anything? Do you have any ideas on how we could elaborate on these very brief descriptions? If so, either comment below or join in directly on the wiki.