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Sell invisibles
In the eyes of many traditionalists, if you don’t make a physical product, then you’re not a real business. What’s the point of endless ‘service businesses’ if they’ve no one to service?
But times are changing. In the last ten years, the weight of a dollar’s worth of US exports has halved. Today, 70 per cent of the value of a new car is intangible. As Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström observed in Funky Business: ‘If your competitive advantage hurts when you drop it on your foot, then you’ve got a problem.’
Whatever you sell, chances are that the greatest value you add is invisible.
Take the case of a German manufacturer recently cited in The Economist magazine. Looking round his vast factory, he told the interviewer: ...
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