From CreativeBusiness

So here we need to discuss and decide upon the details of how we do our research. Once we have decided on which case studies to pursue, we will then gather as much information as possible from secondary resources before doing our primary research. So the discussion we want to have on this page is: What questions do we need to answer? What is the structure of the case study? We need the case studies to be structured as uniformly as possible, so as to enable comparisons, and this means having a uniform set of questions we ask people, and a uniform set of headings for the document itself.

So, if you were thinking about opening up your IP to the world, what would you want to know?

Questions for practitioners

Here are some general questions, but we'll also need to develop more specific lines of enquiry for each particular business.

• Introductory
  • Who are you?
  • What do you do?
  • What's your background?
  • How long have you been doing it?
  • Do you collaborate with anyone else in order to produce your creative works? If so, who?

• Creative works
  • What creative works/data are you producing?
  • Is this a niche or mainstream product?
  • How is this product usually sold?
  • Who is your target audience / market?

• Making your creative works available
  • What are you giving away for free?
  • Are you giving away any rights along with your creative works/data?
  • Are you using alternative licencing, eg. Creative Commons, FDL or GPL?
  • If you are not explicitly giving people the right to copy or redistribute your work, are you making any attempts to prevent them from doing so?
  • How are you distributing your free product?
  • Did this require any specialist technical knowledge to achieve?
  • What technical challenges have you faced, and how did you address them?
  • Have you incurred any additional costs in order to give this creative work away, e.g. bandwidth, hosting? If so, do you know how much?
  • Were there any legal problems that hampered you or changed your plans?

• Income
  • Are you giving away these works to promote a pay-for service, product or performance?
  • If so, what?
  • Do you sell a physical version of the free product?
  • Are you giving people the opportunity to voluntarily pay for the creative work/data you are giving away?
  • How much of your income is direct, i.e. results from sales, subscriptions, adverts, etc.?
  • How much is indirect i.e. results from other such as activities, such as speaking or consulting?

• Your relationship with other parties involved
  • Did you need to convince someone else, such as a publisher or record label, to allow you to release your work freely?
  • If so, who did you need to convince?
  • What arguments did you use?
  • What social challenges have you faced, and how did you address them?

• Motivation
  • Why have you decided to give your works/data away?
  • What benefits do you think you get from giving works/data away?
  • What would have persuaded you not to?
  • What are the risks of giving your works/data away?
  • How have the people around you reacted?
  • How have your fans/audience reacted?
  • Who has reacted negatively, and how?
  • Do you think you got more publicity because you gave your works away?
  • What is lacking in the traditional business model for the type of works you create?
  • What restrictions did you see in that traditional business model?

• Evaluation
  • What were your expectations of the project?
  • How would you define success (e.g. popular / financial / critical)?
  • By your own criteria, do you consider your project to have been a success?
  • What do you think influenced your project's success?
  • Do you have any hard figures, e.g. number of downloads or sales, that you can share with us?
  • Are there other criteria by which your project is not a success?
  • Would you do it again?
  • What, if any, advice would you give others?
  • What, if anything, surprised you?
  • What, if anything, worked well and what didn't?

• General questions about the business model
  • How transferable is your model?
  • Do you think you had specific skills or knowledge that made the project possible?
  • Could someone who is not you use the same tactics?
  • What do you think would happen if all your competitors did the same thing?
  • What do you think would happen if you did the same thing with all of your creative works?
  • If you did not use the most liberal copyright licence available, what do you think would happen if you gave more rights away?
  • Are their any future technological developments that you could foresee damaging your model?
  • Are their any future social developments that you could foresee damaging your model?
  • Are there any future legal developments that you could foresee damaging your model?

Structure for case study

• Introduction (location / business sector / characteristics / why its an interesting case study for our purposes)
• Abstract description of business model (i.e. how the money flows)
• Description of trading history (when did they start? have they made any money yet?)
• Criticism (problems / limitations / praise)
• Conclusions

nb had a quick scope around for business case studies resources, and there's a wealth of sites offering such materials, mainly for education purposes. I del.icio.us tagged 3 as org-cbde. Interesting that they seem to have different formats / structures depending on the function / purpose of the case study.

See also:

• case studies