Online innovation or stagnation?

Published by Martin De Saulles | Filed under Innovation

There is an interesting article about providers of legal, regulatory. tax and patent information by Tim Buckley Owen on the IT Week site. The general thrust of the piece is that large vendors such as Thomson and LexisNexis are not offering users value for money or decent customer service. According to the article, part of the reason for this may be the dominance of the market by a handful of companies leading to a reduction in the incentive to innovate or offer competitive pricing. However, changing user expectations and the increasing availability of free information on the Web may be presenting real challenges to these companies. John Blossom in ContentBlogger adds his thoughts to Tim’s piece and broadly agrees with its sentiment. John’s experience in consulting to information users and providers adds weight to his assertion that, “Business information providers will continue to leverage existing relational databases profitably for some time to come, but at some point in the not too distant future they’re likely to face the same crises faced by information giants such as Reuters as they realized that their allegiance to profitable but outdated platforms meant costly catch-ups in both product design and corporate culture in order to survive.” I shall be revisiting this topic in my module, Innovations in Online Information, which will be running in December. There are still some places available - let me know if you would like to attend. It will run in Brighton over 3 days on the 10th, 11th and 12th December.