The Future of Printed Paper: has just begun

I was thinking about the printing industry and the huge market which has developed and grown around it during the last century. I mean the printing production companies (packaging, sheet and web fed), the publishers (of any kind), the paper suppliers, the suppliers of chemical products (inks and all the rest), of consumables, of heavy machineries, the technology providers, the software providers, the providers of the many many existing services, the creative agencies and so on. It’s a whole world.

The new way of publishing, experiencing and consuming valuable content distributed online - not on paper - has open the debate whether the printing industry and the printed paper will survive this secular shift within the business. It’s not hard to guess that the forecasts aren’t optimistic.

However I’d like to add my two cents to the debate. I do believe that we will still continue to print on paper (digitally, sheet or web fed) variable data, commercial and advertising content, packaging, labels, flyers, calendars, etc. I have no doubt about that. Is it going to be the paper as we know it since centuries or is it going to be a different kind of paper ...? I don’t know. Just have a look to the embedded video to better understand my point.

Who will survive this massive cultural shift? I think those companies that will transform the market and those that will transform themselves to adapt to the new market. To me the real value of the debate isn’t whether the printed paper will survive, but rather the fact that many existing companies will close down their business well before the pulpwood paper will eventually disappear.

To avoid the (personal and social) disaster of shutting a business down because it wasn’t spent any effort trying to identify a good strategy, I’d suggest to think about that: “the freedom we enjoy and we live implies that in each and every decision we make (in our professional and personal life) there is always a new begin”. Within this spirit, innovation becomes a natural outcome of the new begin that exists in every decision we take.

I believe those entrepreneurs that have chosen “not to decide to be safe” should rediscover their courage because after all, what we’ll find tomorrow after this big secular shift will be exactly what we have built today. This crisis it’s a blessing if we manage to rethink, to reimagine and to reinvent our world. The beauty is that each one of us has really the power to make that change: people just need to be aware of this incredible power.