An expresso needs more than a coffee bean and a cup

For the last few years, it's been a cliche of the commercial world that to operate in the middle of a market is suicidal.

The story has gone that it pays either to be an artisan at work in a shed or the employee of a corporate giant bloated on acquisition.

Scale has been a touchstone of competitive advantage.

To be middle-sized has been to be dull, fuzzy, a failing Old Maid kind of business.

And don't bother securitizing one mortgage. Wrap a bundle of them and find a better tomorrow.

Now all of this may be true. But I am starting to wonder.

In The Venturesome Economy, Professor Amar Bhidé of Columbia University takes x-ray specs to innovation:

For any new product, the underlying know-how ranges from the high-level general principles, to mid-level technologies, to ground-level context specific heuristics or rules of thumb.

Bhidé surveys a landscape of products that range

from high-level building blocks or raw materials (microprocessors or the silicon used to make them), to mid-level intermediate goods (the motherboards that contain the microprocessor in laptop computers), to ground-level final products (laptop computers).

And many of the more successful venture capital-backed companies Bhidé studies in his book operate at the mid-level, in a context where

different forms of innovation interact in complicated ways, and it is these interconnected, multilevel advances that create economic value.



Now none of this denies the value of the exceptional execution of an ordinary idea.

Or signals the commercial promise of a middle-sized business that lacks focus or is in the wrong market. 

But it does serve as a reminder that to make a great expresso, you don't just need beans and a cup but an efficient, effective coffee roaster.

It affirms the value of ideas, initiative and forces that operate at the mid-level - see my previous post on China -  phenomena that act as an interface between the high- and ground- levels in society, politics and culture.

Images courtesy of About_some.