Matteus

Having seen this TED-talk, where Michael Pritchard demonstrates how his invention, “The Lifesaver Bottle” turns filthy water into drinking water, and then reading the Facebook comments, I got to thinking:

“Why go asking for $ 20 billion to finance it? Ít’s ridiculous. Get a good business model instead, to create a sustainable solution.”

This is my suggestion how to finance the distribution and maintain the safe drinking water for people:

The key challenge is to have the bottles truly available whenever needed - without a lot of new money. We want new ones, new “refill cartridges”, we want them to go on being used, we want people to understand how long they work, and why they won’t work forever etc. This takes some education, and continoous coordination and adaptation.

To handle this kind of ongoing distribution problem, the free market is the best tool, and economic gain is the most enduring incentive known to man. One problem with the Lifesaver, if you want to sell it, is that it’s very longlived - but also quite expensive!

One way to solve it would be to have a product with smaller cartridges and lower initial cost, so that people with little resources can actually buy one - even if it doesn’t last very long, they won’t need as much money at any given moment. The cost per litre of water would still be acceptable.

Or, you can organise for people to buy the bottle collectively, which would also work.

The absolutely key element is this:
We have to use the existing power structures and incentives, to make sure the bottle, whether individual or collectively owned property, stays available, and doesn’t get lost or stolen etc., in areas where the rule of law is not always a given, where there is no good infrastructure etc,

In every social setting in the world there is a “chief” or a “boss”. Make sure this individual makes money providing the lifesaver bottle (or similar equally effective products) to people at a reasonable price - then you will find that people will start having fresh water and we won’t even have to finance the thing. It will finance itself, and be sustained because the chief makes money.

I got the notion of creating sustainability by making money for the local “chief” from Lars Kolind during a seminar. See The Second Cycle

Now, I’m guessing you may have some problems with this idea. Perhaps you will say:

“What if somebody fakes the product and starts deceiving people to make money?”

To which I’d respond: If somebody create a fake product and sell, then people will continue to get sick and even die, which will make it important to them to make certain themselves it’s the right product. Put it like this - if you exchange the cartridge, and get a “bad one” and then get a diarrhea - well, you know who sold it to you! It’s not like you’re worse off than you were before buying your first bottle, either. Forget perfect. This is about sustainability!

Or perhaps you will say:

“Hey! Everybody has a right to free drinking water! It’s a terrible thing to sell it, and thus deny the poorest people pure drinking water!!!”

To which I’d respond: Well, sure. I suggest the following test: You try to find funding to solve the problem through charity, and continuously keep up the service level so that as many people as possible get free water. I, on the other hand, start the process to sell lifesaver bottles along the lines above. Let’s keep track of how many people have good drinking water through your efforts, and mine, respectively, every half year onwards. What do you think the result would be?

The business model is the way you charge for your products and services - when, how, for what, in what, where, of whom, why and how often.

The business model corresponds to people’s ideas, behaviours and response patterns.

Now, what is truly interesting is that on the one hand, people are always people - we’re predictable - but on the other hand, there are rapid changes going on in services, products and in technology, in concepts, in attitudes, perspectives. All of these things change the experiences available to us, as well as the different kinds of “good” we’re willing to pay for. And sometimes, the changes suddenly mean that the business priorities of financing the existence of a particular good become skewed, compared to what conventional wisdom says, and the way we’re accustomed to doing things. And when this happens, the conventional business model becomes untenable - simply ineffective and expensive.

An obvious example is the music industry, where the conventional business model tied the payment to production of physical media like CD:s. But of course, CD:s are no longer necessary for the distribution.

Because many people prefer to not see what really is, but rather see what they want, what they are used to, or just plainly what somebody tells them to see, we get reactions like:

“Let’s make downloading music criminal” or
“All music should be free” or
“Let’s create ways to sell music and other files via the Internet, and block the ability to share it for free.”

This is all a consequence of the idea that distribution of music should be paid for. The same old idea! It’s stupid.
So Itunes is a success? Well - not because of the business model for selling music. It’s the same old same old. And it’s not music that’s being sold. I think Itunes is a success because it tapped into another value that we want to pay for on the web - the user experience. The feeling of having an Ipod. The feeling of being legal. This is what we pay for! Not the music. And certainly not it’s distribution.

By mentally mapping the way people always are, being people, with the real, factual constitution and qualities and functions of the new attitudes, technologies, concepts, perspectives experiences and types of good people are willing to pay for, we can discover new ways to charge for goods, ways that are much more appreciated by the customer and much more profitable for the supplier.

And this is exceptionally valuable, because whenever this happens, we are able to either (1) enjoy an enormous increase of the good in question, or (2) free an amazing amount of talent and resources to create some other good (or just enjoy life). Or both.

This is the deal with new business models.

Just getting the blog set up. It will be about business and strategic development. There may be some thoughts about Midzone, and probably a lot about value and priorities in life. I often feel enthusiastic about some observation - seeing what is - and about how I want things to be - knowing what you want - and doing it.

I hope I’ll not be writing about what I want to do, but about what I have done. I hope that will be a story worth telling.