Increasingly, consumers are participants instead of passive audience
members, and this mega-trend manifests itself in a variety of ways. In
fact, the more we hear about GENERATION C making money from its
creations, and the more we focus on the financial rewards consumers are
reaping from participating in CUSTOMER MADE projects, the more the
myriad of other entrepreneurial undertakings by ordinary consumers makes
sense.

We have dubbed this trend 'MINIPRENEURS' : a vast army of consumers
turning entrepreneurs; including small and micro businesses,
freelancers, side-businesses, weekend entrepreneurs, web-driven
entrepreneurs, part-timers, free agents, cottage businesses,
seniorpreneurs, co-creators, mompreneurs, pro-ams, solopreneurs, eBay
traders, advertising-sponsored bloggers and so on.


Want numbers?

--According to a July 2005 survey conducted by eBay, more than 724,000
Americans report that eBay is their primary or secondary source of
income. In addition to these professional eBay sellers, another 1.5
million individuals say they supplement their income by selling on eBay.
--Over 50,000 people in the UK draw a significant portion of their income
from selling goods online. A study by the Centre for Economics and
Business Research (CEBR) shows that the average household boosts its
earnings by GBP 3,000 through online trading.
--And Mastercard and Warillow International published a research study on a new class of small business: the 'Web-Driven Entrepreneur', estimating that there are 5 million of these businesses in the United States, representing 25% of all small businesses.

So what are the drivers behind the MINIPRENEURS trend, and what does the
ecosystem sustaining it look like?



1. Multinationals of one

(Re)sources once exclusively available (and exclusively affordable) to
multinational firms, from access to marketplaces to partnering with top
talent, are now at the fingertips of experienced, entrepreneurial
individuals. Consumers are discovering that besides being the buyer in
the capitalist equation, they can now also make a buck (or yen or pound
or euro or dinar) by doing a bit of manufacturing, enterprising,
venturing, selling, trading, or auctioning themselves.


2. Being in control of one's destiny

Building on the above: human beings forever fantasize about control,
independence and being in charge. Let's face it, being one's own boss,
even if it's only for three hours a week, is just too tempting to
forego, as is the extra income. As we've discussed before, trends are
often manifestations of something that unlocks existing needs and wants
in a new way. The MINIPRENEURS trend certainly fits that mold.






3. Enterprising is chic

Gone are the days when 'entrepreneur' equaled running a small store, or
conducting shady 'import and export' transactions. From Jones Organics
to 21st century barbershop Sharps to German Sparschwein to Danish
TrioBike to the slew of online success stories like Flickr and Weblogs,
Inc : there's an explosion of hip, admired ventures, online and offline,
around the world (accelerated by the tech revolution, and the truly
exceptional entrepreneurs with vision and skills that started it; a far
cry from the Old Boys networks in the past). It's Traditional Big
Business that's now often seen as unsophisticated, at best.
MINIPRENEURIALISM can actually be chic, allowing one to think big while
implementing small.



4. Experience rules, and so does less risk

For decades, consumers in mature consumer societies have been training
to become experts in business, marketing and advertising (read: seeing
right through it, and understanding the workings beneath it). The
business of business is something that now interests producers and
consumers alike. No wonder MINIPRENEURS are confident enough to try
their hand at businesses of their own. Added benefit: the risks they'll
take as MINIPRENEURS are in no way comparable to the gut wrenching
stress that comes with managing listed corporations. And neither is the
cost structure! (More on that below.)




5. A need for the unusual

MINIPRENEURS , including commerce-minded members of GENERATION C , are
providing other consumers with more choice and variety (which is the
holy grail in a NOUVEAU NICHE world). They're offering something that's
different, that's special, that's vintage, that's quirky, that's
customized if not beyond personalized, that's fringe, or that's just not
profitable enough to be developed by big corporations instead of
well-meaning enthusiasts. The long tail depends as much on GENERATION C
as it does on MINIPRENEURS .








Today's aspiring and established MINIPRENEURS truly have a
highly-developed network of intermediaries, tools, resources, and
processes at their disposal. It's an ecosystem on a much more elaborate
scale than anyone foresaw even five years ago when entrepreneurialism
was all the rage during the .com boom. MINIPRENEURS have access, for
peanuts, if not for free, to:

A. Hardware, software, ICT and skills
B. Design, production and manufacturing
C. Monetizing existing assets
D. Marketplaces
E. Advertising
F. Travel
G. Talent, finance, payment, logistics

A. Hardware, software, ICT and skills on the cheap





In the same way that GENERATION C has access to affordable yet
professional-grade software, cameras and other creative gadgets,
MINIPRENEURS can get their business up and running instantly, relying on
everything from rock-bottom priced laptops, printers and open source
software, to broadband connections and free telephony (with tech giants
like Skype/eBay ,Google Talk and MSN battling it out who can bring the
free-est of the free to savvy consumers and MINIPRENEURS ).

The same goes for information, knowledge and acquiring skills: there are
more courses, classes, forums, sites, and informational blogs dedicated
to the art of MINIPRENEURISM than you can shake a stick at.

B. Design, production and manufacturing




GENERATION C may have its lulu.com ,purevolume.com and deviantart.com to
flaunt and flog its digital wares, but what about MINIPRENEURS who want
to develop, create and sell physical products? Look no further than
sites like Zazzle.com ,Qoop.com , and 800 pound gorilla Cafepress.com .
The latter has a network of over 2 million members who have created more
than 8 million designs on 70+ customizable products ranging from apparel
and home and office accessories to music and data CDs and books to
prints, posters and cards. Every day, roughly 14,000 new items are
added, and approximately 1,000 new, independent shops join the
CafePress.com network.

Taking it one step further is US-based eMachineshop.com , which lets
ordinary consumers download free, easy-to-use software
which they can use to design objects like car parts, door knobs, in
metal or plastic. They can then get a quote, order the product online
and eMachineshop will forward the design to a 'real world' machine shop
for manufacturing. Suddenly, MINIPRENEURS have injection molding,
milling, turning, laser cutting, waterjet cutting, wired EDM, tapping,
bending, blanking, punching, plastic extrusion, thermoforming, and
casting at their fingertips. Who's going to set up local competitors to
service MINIPRENEURS in Asia, Europe, South America?


C. Monetizing existing assets

Some MINIPRENEURS don't produce or create; they simply make money from
assets or experience they already possess. Random spottings:




Zopa
UK-based Zopa , a place where creditworthy borrowers who'd like to
borrow money can get together with other consumers who are happy to lend
it to them. Cutting out the middleman, lenders (read: MINIPRENEURS ) set
their own rate of return and choose which borrowers they want to lend
to. Zopa manages various 'markets', matching lenders with borrowers'
various risk profiles. The start-up, after four months of operations,
now has more 26,000 members (source: FT). 35 per cent of members are
lenders, who between them have GBP 3 million in capital waiting to be
handed out. Average loans have been between GBP 2,000 and GBP 5,000,
with lenders so far seeing average returns of 7.6 percent. Consumers
turning into bankers: how's that for MINIPRENEURISM ?

D. Marketplaces



Once products are ready to be traded, most MINIPRENEURS will of course
head for eBay , which now boasts more than 64 million active users
worldwide, and is hosting more than 260,000 storesÊ worldwide, of which
about 158,000 on the US site. The sheer size of eBay has spawned so many
small businesses and MINIPRENEURS catering in turn to fellow
MINIPRENEURS , that we're not even going to try to list them here.
Suffice to say that everything from drop-off stores to eBay seminars to
Trading Assistants is thriving. More at FEEDER BUSINESSES !

And let's not forget Amazon.com's Marketplace and zShops , where
MINIPRENEURS can showcase their products alongside Amazon.com's own
selection. Secure payments and shipping solutions included, as well as
access to millions of Amazon.com customers.

E. Advertising

In only a few years time, Google AdWords managed to sign up 150,000
advertisers, from Fortune 500 companies to MINIPRENEURS , introducing a
fully automated, global and pretty sophisticated ad system at the
disposal of even the smallest of small businesses. Bartering is thriving
as well: Link Market for example, which lets webmasters exchange
banners, has more than 25,000 members, with more than 1 million banners
exchanged since it started in 2003. Here too, thousands of businesses
now help fellow MINIPRENEURS to make the best of their (limited)
advertising budgets, while in this Free Agent era, top creative talent
from established advertising agencies can easily be found to help out
with local mini-campaigns, bartering with clients instead of sending USD
50,000 invoices.

F. Travel




Business is global. Talent is global. Customers are global. Regardless
of the infinite number of bits and pixels now traversing the world,
MINIPRENEURS will have to travel, and will want to travel. Luckily, just
like the virtual world, the offline world is now connected in ways
previously unimaginable: a web of low cost airlines, low cost hotels,
low cost rental cars, low cost *everything* has sprung up over the last
few years.


G. And it just goes on and on...

Logistics |FedEx delivers to 220 countries, actively targeting
MINIPRENEURS with their Kinko/FedEx centers, while in the US, eBay and
the US Postal Service (USPS) recently launched the traveling eBay
Sell-It-Ship-It workshop (on a bus), answering general questions about
selling on eBay and shipping with the USPS.

Financing and global payments | For the new world of payments, look no
further than MINIPRENEURS poster-child PayPal , which allows the
transfer of money between email users and merchants, and performs
payment processing for e-commerce vendors, auction sites, and other
corporate users, operates in 57 countries and manages over 78.9 million
accounts, many of them belonging to MINIPRENEURS .

Talent | Whether MINIPRENEURS want to sell their talents or need to hire
others: sites like GetAFreelancer.com ,eLancer.co.kr ,Contracted Work ,
and Freelance Work Exchange will connect them to other professionals in
a heartbeat.

Connecting | Finding likeminded MINIPRENEURS , potential partners and
other independent minds has never been easier thanks to networking sites
like LinkedIn ,OpenBC , and Ryze .

Anyway, you get the picture. By itself most of the above examples may
not be spanking new to you, but when you connect the dots, it's clear
that everything is now in place to allow MINIPRENEURIALISM to blossom on
an even bigger scale, which brings us to...



No doubt you've already spotted other drivers and ecosystem categories
to be added to our findings. So how to profit from them? One word:
FACILITATE! Ask yourself how you can help consumers become MINIPRENEURS
; help them to make money by facilitating their admin, their production,
their advertising, their insurance, their travel, their networking,
their selling, their tech needs, their learning, their payments, their
suggestions, their hosting, their new business ideas. Don't ask them to
consume; help them to create, to produce.

Context

Do re-read the GENERATION C ,CUSTOMER-MADE and NOUVEAU NICHE trend
descriptions: they complete the overall picture of consumers becoming
more enterprising and creative, resulting in an avalanche of new (and
often inspiring, surprising) content, new ideas and new products. When
will things get really interesting from a consumer behavioral point of
view? How about millions of consumers-turned, tried and tested
MINIPRENEURS having even less tolerance for mishaps and bad service from
'fellow' entrepreneurs (read: YOU)?




Next?

We may not have seen anything yet. With more MINIPRENEURS springing up
every hour (keep an extra keen eye on the 50+ crowd), 'new' business
models will continue to emerge: from aggregation models (if MINIPRENEURS
unite, they can demand discounts just like large corporations do;
there's definitely an opportunity to resurrect letsbuyit.com) to more
sophisticated bartering, to new style incubators helping MINIPRENEURS
get their ideas and inventions to market. No rest for the wicked...

Publisher: Trendwatching
One of the world's fastest growing trend agencies, independent and opinionated TRENDWATCHING.COM scans the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. So whether youre a marketer, management consultant, head of a start-up, student, researcher, journalist, business development director, fellow trend watcher, or just interested in staying on top of the latest trends, TRENDWATCHING.COM will instantly bring you up-to-date by getting the worlds most promising trends right in front of you
Web: www.trendwatching.com
Published: march 2005
Market: mens womens
Region: usa

DISCLAIMER
Information in this report relies on sources including Trade Shows, Associations, News Releases, Government Reports and other public sources. Infomat can accept no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information or for loss or damage caused by any use thereof.