What to do in the current climate seems to be the difficult question facing us now. Should we diversify into new areas to try and get more revenue, learn new skills, take advantage of new digital platforms and the opportunities they may produce?
We have just had a session with Scott Kirsner, discussing building an audience and a creative career in the digital age. Scott looked at 7 themes, including new models of distribution, how to fund your projects, to consider when trying to launch a career.
From the audience, the main themes that seemed to come out of the session were how difficult it was to get funding, to get their project noticed, to understand all the new business models and the new distribution models.
This got me thinking about interactive content, as Scott’s talk was mainly focused on the film world. We, the games and digital space, are very good at working on new platforms with new technology and on new ideas, so already we diversify by nature rather than by necessity. So what do we do with the old adage of 'Stick to the Knitting', a famous management theme first mooted by management guru Tom Peters, I believe. Do we throw away all the old learning now that we are in a new digital age? Do we think that everything is new, therefore we need new methods to deal with it? or do we try and utilize our old learning and apply it to the new digital age? Does a games company become a music, art and software development company, just as digital agencies seem to moving into interactive content development and do we therefore throw away the years of learning that has established us in our sector?
As we touch on this theme more and more, I am getting the sense that companies really need to focus on their core skills (stick to the knitting) while thinking how they can utilize these skills in new and hopefully lucrative new areas. Of course, we need to understand the audience, the technology, the revenue opportunities but we also need to understand what we have and how we can best utilize our internal resource so I guess stick to the knitting while diversifying or “festina lente”
