If you have used a Daily Deal service you might well have thought it a good idea.  And so it has been for Groupon – although the talk in the US is that the company is now getting smaller, after a year of dramatic growth.

But whether you know what a Daily Deal is or not, the message behind the phenomenon is interesting.  

One company came up with a brilliant idea, wrote the software to make it happen, and then started to make money on it.

That was fine, but then two other forces came into play.  One was that (perhaps) ultimately the public got a bit fed up with the novelty and drifted away; Groupon appears to have difficulty getting enough repeat customers.  The other was that the big guys picked up on the idea.  Google is now setting up its own rival version.

Does this mean that all innovation in terms of nifty ideas is dead?   Probably not, providing the idea targets a very specific group.  In such a case, if you get in first, others are less likely to follow simply because the market is so specialist.

At the beginning of the year the daily deal market was said to have revived local searches and local business.  The industry might still group, but it is not clear who will remain at the top.

The problem seems to be that if one person can program an answer, so can others.  And of course you can’t copyright an idea.

In short, the small, specialist idea in the specialist market which isn’t totally based around programming, is still a good place to explore.

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Tony Attwood

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