Economic Downturn and businesses that deal with innovation projects - what to do?

Question

The effects of the current economic crisis is far reaching. Here in Australia we are seeing massive cut backs on spending and massive job cuts in big business - mining giant Rio Tinto has just announced 14,000 jobs being cut world wide (~2/3 contractors, 1/3 employees).

My business specialises in short term innovative software development, such as pre-commercialisation of research coming out of universities, developing proof of concept systems, etc. The problem at them moment is that when businesses get conservative, innovation (R&D) is the first thing they cut. So, all my clients are sitting on their wallets...

With even a few months of scarce work, small consultancies like mine start to get shaky. I'm starting to think that thinking laterally is required. I'm interested to know what options this community thinks are out there for a small team of excellent developers to pick up work in the short term?

There is always a silver lining - with projects off the boil, I'll have more time to write blog entries, hoping to make enough form advertising to put food on the table and shoes on my kids feet. Ok, I don't have any kids.

Oh, and yes, Rio Tinto was one of my major clients!

Cheers,

Dan

Answer 1

One possibilty is to concentrate on tools/products that show immediate cost savings for the customer. Imediate cost savings are probably the only Unique Selling Point that will get you through the door in the current climate.

Areas to try are a replacement for an existing but expensive product with a simpler cheaper (and hopefully better) easy to implement one of your own. (CAs product list is a good place to start looking :-} ).

Tools that help migrate from an existing expensive product to a cheaper alternative (Oracle to Postgress migration).

A replacement for an existing product that runs on an "expensive" platform like z/OS,TANDEM,UNISYS with your product that runs on a cheaper Wintel/Linux.

The other possible area is in business process/workflow. Cost cutting usually involves drastic reorganisations, which, in turn mean drastic changes to established procedures. Any product which eases the pain of altering business workflows is always welcome.

Answer 2

Is it possible to get more into the research at various educational institutions? For example, could your team work on some research that is a partnership between the university or college or whatever and your company to do various research in whatever areas your team has expertise that may be something a government would invest or offer tax incentives to get into, e.g. some greener technologies may get some government funding for being environmentally friendly and worth pursuing further development upon. That is my suggestion for another route to take, possibly becoming a group of instructors for college programs possibly.