Digital Transformation Project – Creating a sustainable non-profit monopoly

13

October

2016

5/5 (4)

Introduction

Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN) has been supporting the standardization process in the Netherlands for over 100 years. Standards are often voluntary agreements between market players that joined one of NEN’s 480 standardization committees. They are laid down in documents managed by a standards organization, such as NEN. Popular standards include ‘ISO 9000 – Quality management’ and ‘NEN 7512:2015 – Health informatics – Information security in healthcare – Requirements for trusted exchange of health information’.

NEN is currently managing over 33.000 standards, which are available on their online store or for sale at their office in Delft. As some of the standards are required to be used by Dutch law, part of these documents are made ‘open access’ to the general public. Because NEN is a non-profit business organization, the profit margin on the sale of these standards is minimal. Parties interested in the standardization procedure bear part of the costs of the standard development process. This income, together with the proceeds from the sale of standards and the transfer of knowledge in training programs, ensures that NEN can carry out all its duties.

Standard development process

The development of a standard usually takes a few years and is divided into several stages. The first stage in the development of a standard is understanding the market demand and create a new work item proposal (NWIP). When there is enough support, stakeholders will be approached in the preparation stage. When there are enough interested stakeholders, the committee stage will occur. A committee will be formed out of the stakeholder’s pool. This committee will discuss the content of the new standard in the enquiry stage. This will occur in around-the-table meetings. Standards will be saved in Microsoft Word documents. The documents will be saved in a database called the ISOlutions program and automatically shared with other committee members. After the committee discussed and confirmed the content of the standard, there will be a ballot in the approval stage. Whenever there isn’t a majority supporting the standard, the content will be reviewed in the enquiry stage. However, if there is a majority, the standard will be approved and published in the publication stage (ISO, 2016).

Current model

The current strategy of NEN to consult its customers is to reach out through press releases. In this way, certain parties know that NEN is about to undertake a new activity that they might find interesting to join or comment on. A press release is shared on NEN’s own website (www.nen.nl) and send to specific publishers of magazines in a field coherent with the activity to reach experts on that field. Additionally, these press releases are shared in one of NEN’s sixteen email newsletters. Another more recent method of reaching out to potential customers is to share these press releases on LinkedIn with the aim of reaching a different audience (i.e. the audience that does not visit NEN’s website or reads these magazines/newsletters). However, as LinkedIn is not convenient for this approach and limited in terms of reachability (i.e. articles are usually only shared within NEN’s existing network) this method is not as effective.

Disruptive model

Through a community all stakeholders can get involved in the process of drafting standards: a community will make it easier to get in contact with other stakeholders to interact with a centralized system. Additionally, questions can be asked and answered among other stakeholders who are in the same field and therefore have a lot of inside knowledge. Also, by being active in the community answering questions, these experts will be more visible for third parties bringing additional value. Also, NEN deals currently with 150 questions a day about the norms. This can decrease when stakeholders can ask the questions in the NEN community and therefore will save NEN a lot of time.

A prospective community can be combined with NENCrowd (NEN’s crowdfunding platform) to offer additional benefits to backers. In this way, price differentiation is realized and thus a larger potential customer base can be served. This also works vice versa: If NEN’s prospective community attracts a lot of users, more and more people are getting involved. This can cause an increase in financial contributors.

Thank you for reading! Team 76

References

ISO (2016). ‘Voting and membership in ISO’ retrieved 11 October 2016, from
http://www.iso.org/sites/ConsumersStandards/voting_iso.html

www.NEN.nl

 

 

 

 

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The new way to book live music!

26

September

2016

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Imagine, you are looking for an artist to perform, at your wedding, your office party, to spice up your huis-warming, for in your café or restaurant or for your best friends birthday. Where do you go? We used to have to google artists, call around, use the phone book or use a third party booking agents.. which always charge way to much. And this all is just way too complicated.

Why not make it easier?

Plugify has disrupted the music booking industry in the Netherlands. Plugify was set up to make the search for artists a lot easier. The success of Plugify is already evident, in just one day it reached €200.000 through Crowdfunding and in five weeks it reached it’s goal of € 745.690!

How does it work?

Think of Airbnb and Booking.com, how simple it is to book an apartment or hotel? Plugify is the Airbnb for booking artists! Within 4 simple steps you can book the artists of your dream on the Plugify Platform.  The first step is to find the artists and get a taste of their style. On Plugify there are already more than 380 artists, from DJ’s to pianists to coverbands to quarttets. Moreover, in every price range you can find unique talents. There are multiple filters such as price, length of performance, repertoire and mood and within seconds you can find the artists to your preference! Every artist has to post a video and picture of what there set looks like so the customer can get a taste of what the artist is about. Step 2, Check availability. Within three days the artist will reply and let you know whether they are available. Step 3. Accept the artists offer. The Plugify artists also allows direct and secured payment. The price of the a performance is immediately transparent. So no more envelopes of cash on the evening itself or invoices afterwards. Moreover, once you paid it’s a done deal, so no more costs after the performance such as parking costs or transfer costs. The motto of Plugify is what you see is what you get!

Step 4: Enjoy the music and rate the artists. Once the artists has performed the booker gets a request to review the artist. This only takes 2 to 5 minutes and not only does the artist benefit from this but the Plugify Community as well. Why? Because the better the reviews, the higher the artists are in the ranking. This also serves as an incentive for artists to book through Plugify as the more they play, the more reviews, the higher they get in the rankings and the more they get booked. It’s a vicious cycle and creates high switching costs for artists.

What’s in it for Plugify? Plugify earns 12 % commission from the booking. However, as a further incentive for its artists the commission decreases to solely 8% the more the artists get booked! This way, Plugify promotes the artist to get booked through Plugify and discourages the artist to “go around” Plugify.

But what if the artist needs technique and apparatus and this is not available at the wished location? Plugify has thought of that as well. You can rent the right and appropriate technique on Plugify without a third person and the technique rental company has direct contact with the artist so no more hassle for the customer!

The Plugify platform is a community for both artists and bookers and is a win-win situation. The more artists join the platform, the more bookers will come to the platform and the more artists will be booked.  The value of Plugify is in it’s users. Plugify enjoys scale as it’s competitors aren’t as far along and hesitant in reacting. This increases the bargaining power for Plugify and widens their competitive moat.

Plugify still has a long road ahead of them but they are on the right track. Let the music flow!

 

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The Rise of Communities as a Business Model

10

September

2016

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One of the oldest known business models is rising again in the digital age. It’s the business model of a community. Back before there were cities people were living in communities and everyone was contributing to each others growth. Even though this can not really be called a business model, it is quite similar to what resurfaces on the internet again.

 

Communities became more specific and niche
A community can be defined as a “social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the large society within which it exists.”
In today’s online world communities have much more specific purposes or characteristics than looking back to a thousand years ago. There has been a proliferation of communities from communities that had survival as a purpose to communities that are very niche in their outlook. As much as with anything on the internet there has been a proliferation and specialisation.

 

Communities from A to Z
 
There are countless types of communities on the Internet and they exist on different platforms. Typically you would of course think of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat as a place for communities to be build. However actually an astonishing number of web companies or applications are build on communities.
Uber is not much of a taxi booking service, but it rather also is a community. It’s a community of people who drive people from A to B. And a community of people who are in need of transport solutions. Uber connects these two communities and creates value this way.
Similarly AirBnB is a community that creates most of its value through having a large number of members in their community. AirBnBs contribution to the community is to run the platform the community is build on: They attract more members, create rules and help out in case there are conflicts.
So, Uber is a community for people looking to share a ride and AirBnB is a community of people who would like to share places to stay. Still if you look on any social media platform communities can get much more niche. An quite random example for this is Nerdfitness.com, a community for nerds and the average Joe aiming to become more fit and healthy.

 

From community to business model
 
Still a community doesn’t yet make a business model. However if you have a community of people you can make a business out of it by adding value. This value can be of any form.
You could sell products to your community that help members achieve their goals or solve problems.
You could charge a membership fee for members to be part of the community.
You could add value by creating rules & regulations for your community that create a safe environment for members to connect.
You could recommend products to members of your community and earn a commission.
So there are many ways to monetise a community and make a business out of it. But how many people does your community need? If you only run a business for yourself and do not have any employees it might be less than you think…

 

Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans
In a popular blog article Kevin Kelly calculated the number of people you need to make a living of your community. He argues that you only do need 1000 people, to make a living of your community. There are some caveats to his theory, however it still is an astonishing number and an interesting stream of thought to think about.
What do you think of communities as a business model and how do you make use of the power of communities in your business? Give it a thought, your competitors are doing it as well.
The importance of community also shows in the tile of the Rotterdam School of Management Leadership Summit 2016, which is “From Me to We”. Business is not about only you any more, but it is more and more about achieving things together. And you do not only need to get your own employees but also your customers on board with you to achieve your mission.

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