“There are two ways to make money in business: You can unbundle, or you can bundle.” – Jim Barksdale, cofounder of Netscape

As frameworks for identifying opportunities in startupland go, unbundling / (re)bundling is amongst the most seminal ones out there.

Here is an example of how it works.

Visualize a product that helps you read (for a fee) any magazine / newspaper story – effectively you have unbundled or decoupled the story from the wrapper. Now imagine, you had an option every saturday to get a printed / ebook of all of the stories you selected for leisurely reading. Voila, you have created a new magazine via (re)bundling. But it is different because you have control over the components. The atomic unit of control has shifted with this new bundle from the wrapper to the stories.

I suppose inherently that is what unbundling / bundling is all about – it enables the user to have better control over the components of the bundle, so as to decouple certain components from the wrapper, and / or allow reconstituting of all or different elements of the bundle to fashion a different product.

Let us use unbundling to think through the creation of an adult or human being.

Unbundling the creation of adults

Historically / traditionally, to become a functioning adult, the following needed to have happened / come together.

Marriage + Sex + Fertility + Childbirth + Parenthood + Childcare => creation of an adult.

Some of the above are conditions / status like fertility, e.g., men needed to have an adequate sperm count, or parenthood (parental status; being recognized as the parent). Others are actions like marriage, childbirth etc.

Marriage was a highly desirable but not necessary condition. So you have

Sex + Fertility + Childbirth + Parenthood + Childcare => creation of an adult.

This is essentially the out-of-wedlock child. Incidentally 70% of the births in Iceland (60% in Bulgaria, 40% in US) are out-of-wedlock births. In countries like India, percentages are lower given the paternalistic nature of society.

Sex, or having the father and mother indulge in coitus, in order to fertilize the egg is not essential. IVF or Invitro Fertilization allows the fertilization to happen outside the body. This typically happens when one of the couple is infertile.

So we could certainly have

Marriage + Childbirth + Parenthood + Childcare => creation of an adult.

T...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments