Scholarly Publishing in Transition - 4 Strategies for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma
Scholarly Publishing in Transition - 4 Strategies for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma
Markets in transition give rise to fascinating anomalies.
Take the car as an example. When they first appeared in the 1860s automobiles (then steam-powered) were capable of travelling much faster than horse-drawn vehicles. Yet the British government thought they were potentially so dangerous to other road users that it introduced The Red Flag Acts in 1865, limiting their speeds to 2 miles an hour and requiring all cars to be preceded through the streets by a man on foot waving a red flag.
It’s easy to laugh now at the absurdity of this situation, but the Victorians weren’t fools. The Red Flag Act made sense at the time. It’s only when we look back at what seems now to be an obvious and inevitable trajectory for the technology and its applications that it looks foolish.
But notice that the foolishness, the anomaly, comes from the Estate. It’s not intrinsic to the market.
Scholarly Publishing in Transition - 4 Strategies for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma
‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’. Scholarly publishers are so fixated on protecting the vested interests that have made their business model so successful in the past, that they are wilfully ignoring the innovations that will make them irrelevant.
(Just another name for rent-seeking)
