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Curation: Less, but better
23 October, 2020
“No one living can give a
guess of what is coming along this line, much better than anyone living could
conjecture the final outcome of Columbus' experiment . . .”
My Flying Machine Story, Gleanings in Bee Culture, 1 Jan
1905.
Perhaps the most momentous scoop in press history was
reported in the apiarists' journal of choice - Gleanings in Bee Culture - in Ohio early in the 20th Century. In 1903 garbled reports had appeared in local newspapers about an
event in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but had garnered little or no attention.
It took the restless curiosity and energy of Amos Root, founder of the
Gleanings publication, to put that right. On 20 September 1904 Amos travelled
to Dayton, Ohio and watched Wilbur Wright fly the first complete circle in an aeroplane.
Root wrote an article but delayed it until the following January at Wilbur's
request. When it was published this report, and several follow-ups, were the
only distributed eyewitness accounts of the flights and it took a considerable
amount of time for the wider world to become aware of the achievements of the
Wright Brothers.
Since the beginning of the last century, things have changed
beyond measure in terms of the level of information available, and the idea
that a story as big as this took so long to break now seems absurd. The problem
we currently face is actually the reverse of the one that existed before: there
is so much information available that in 2011 each American consumed the
equivalent of 175 newspapers a day.[1] In
December 2016, IBM wrote a report in that offered the fascinating insight that
90% of all the data in the world at that time had been created in the last two
years. More recently, the company estimated that the world now produces over
2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day and that the rates of data growth are
in the region of 60% per annum[2].
This problem of data creation and overload is familiar to anyone
with a work email account, and the wonderful metaphor 'drinking from the
firehose' has been adopted by office workers everywhere to signal their
concerns. Rather than being more informed we are finding ourselves on the verge
of paralysis.
An online search confirms that there are 848 pages of Jeans available
on Amazon.co.uk and a similar search reveals that the average Walmart
Supercentre holds over 140,000 SKUs (a type of
scannable bar code.) The modern industrial model is built on offering choice
and now companies are finding that consumers are unable to make decisions in
the face of the tyranny of this choice. This problem of material abundance has perhaps
been best described by the writer and forecaster James Wallman who coined the
term 'stuffocation'.
For consumers, the antidote to this problem is the
development of a more selective model by the corporate sector and this can
perhaps be best described as a form of 'curation'. Initially this might sound
like it solely belongs in some highbrow sphere like museums or the art world,
but the blogger Maria Popova has said that “the art of curation isn't about the
individual pieces of content but about how these pieces fit together”. Thought of in
this way, curation is a type of filtering that many business models will need to
move towards. Luxury companies have understood this for a long time. Ferrari's
2011 decision to cut production numbers of cars was based on an insight of its
then CEO, Luca Di Montezemolo, who said, “We don't sell a normal product. We
sell a dream”. For Ferrari scarcity helps build the dream.
Not everything can be premiumised though, and amongst the
failures of the big box retail sector, discounters such as Aldi and Lidl have
continued to do well, so price continues to be a fundamental driver.
Nonetheless we do expect to see both a reduction in SKUs, more refined
filtering, and a conversion to what has been termed 'experiential shopping' to
be the key themes in the survival of physical retailing.
For digital retailing then it is clear that curation is both
a major component of the disease of overload and also its potential cure. The
amount of digital data is doubling every three years or so — growing more than four
times more quickly than the world economy, and the rate of change is constantly
increasing. By the end of 2013 there were 1,200 exabytes (1018 bytes)
of stored data in the world[3]. Less than 2% of this was non-digital, whereas in
2000 75% of information was analogue[4]. Eric Schmidt,
in his book How Google Works, stated
that Google 'curates the internet.' The company is both harbinger of the deluge
and an elegant response to the need for it to be managed. Remarkable things can
be achieved by big data but only if it is framed and used effectively.[5]
One of our investments, and an exemplar of a commercial
enterprise that offers solutions to the problem of the scale of data, is the
Anglo-Dutch publisher Relx. One of the services the company offers is legal,
regulatory and business information and analytics, under a product called
LexisNexis. The product database contains 119 billion document records to which
1.3 million new legal documents are added every day.[6] The system allows
busy lawyers to search and curate the huge wealth of data into something
entirely comprehensible and useful.
The company also recently made an acquisition of a fast-growing
data analytics business that enables pharmaceutical companies to make better
decisions about research and development. This is a classic big data sphere
that we expect to undergo radical change. The cost of finding - and then
getting - a drug past phase III clinical trials is estimated to be US$2.6bn and
the annual research spend for the industry as a whole is over US$100bn. The
odds of taking a drug from discovery to marketing are very small; from over
5,000 compounds, fewer than 5% will make it to pre-clinical trials, and for
every 10 of those, only one will make it to approval.[7] Greater
efficiency is desperately needed and we believe digitisation and a subsequent
marshalling of big data will provide the solution to the problem.
When Dieter Rams, the renowned industrial designer - perhaps
best known for his work at Braun - was asked for his design philosophy, he
replied, 'Weniger, aber besser' or 'Less, but better'. This might
well be a good slogan for the growing sustainability movement. However, it also
describes how the industrial model is changing in almost every sector, and how
digitisation can help, but must also itself be managed. For those who have
understood this there will be many investment opportunities along the way.
[1] Daniel Levitin The Organized
Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, 2014,
[2] IBM Marketing Cloud, “10 Key Marketing Trends
for 2017”, 2016
[3] Big Data, A Revolution That Will Transform
How We Live, Work, And Think, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier,
2013
[4] Science, The World›s Technological Capacity to Store,
Communicate and Compute Information, 2011
[5] We owe a debt of
gratitude to the book Curation by
Michael Bhaskar for helping us gain insight into this topic.
[6] www.relx.com
[7] The Pharmaceutical Journal, Drug
Development: the journey of a medicine from lab to shelf, 2015
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