"Real innovation has a democratizing influence"

Ann Miura-Ko, Co-Founding Partner, Floodgate –considered the most powerful woman in venture capital.

When Johannes Guttenberg introduced the printing press his innovation democratized knowledge and information, bringing it out of the confines of the very few to provide access to the many. Ann Miura-Ko talks about democratization because she is looking for technology innovation that creates a "democratizing influence" as one of her conditions for venture capital investment.

The print industry is currently obsessed with the idea of converting printers to "marketing service providers" – asking printers to extend their current product set to participate in the digital economy by offering pure digital products (e.g. e-mail, pURLS, etc…). I'm not convinced that we have fully exploited the print market. If we confine our conversation to printed products whose communication intent is to "help businesses to promote themselves", have we as an industry truly "democratized" access to professional promotional printed materials?

Technology can enable "democratization" by providing access to markets that were previously unaddressable in a profitable manner. The best example in our industry is Vistaprint's consolidation of the micro business/small business market leveraging expert online marketing and web enabled self service order entry.

A key to maximizing profits in a mature market is innovation. The book, Blue Ocean Strategy described this brilliantly. Don't fight head to head in a well defined market, innovate to expand the pie and dominate in the newly created space or "Blue Ocean." Many participants in this industry are trying to hang on to the business they have, I'm a bigger fan of offense. How do we individually and collectively increase the size of the pie? We create new reasons to print and/or we expand the access to the market of printed products.

What other corners of the print market have yet to be "addressed" in order to bring the benefits of print to a wider audience, thus expanding the overall market instead of fighting it out for the currently contracting print market?

Sometimes the challenges to market expansion extend beyond what the industry provides as a core product. You have to solve the whole puzzle in order to reap the rewards of the market expansion/evolution. Apple's brilliance wasn't limited to the devices (iPod, iPhone, and iPad), the real innovation was in the iTunes platform – the ecosystem which seamlessly connected the devices and stored the rich content. With an established platform they were able to extend into brilliant business models like the App Store – democratizing software developer's access to millions of end users.