Sermo in the Blogsphere

A most brilliant business model for communities

Mopsos Blog

November, 2006 - I just bumped into Sermo's website, which at first sight looks like yet another community space for physicians. There is a slight difference though:

On Sermo, there is no cost to physicians to participate. In fact, Sermo also enables physicians to be financially rewarded for their astute observations and clinical insights. The source of the rewards is financial institutions who access a stream of fresh and actionable information on emerging trends and market-changing events in healthcare. A cash reserve is set-aside to compensate physicians for observations that are deemed highly relevant and valuable.

Now this is absolutely great. It's actually the publisher's business model that we discussed the other day with my friend Dominique Turcq. On the one hand, community members find value in sharing good practices to help them in their day to day job, whereas funding organizations are interested in derived content and data. This is an open market version of what we are doing in companies when we create communities of practice. In a company, communities recruit employees who believe it is valuable to network with their peers to find good answers to complex questions -they are right!. As such they treasure the real-time and tacit aspects of knowledge sharing. Top management, on the other hand funds communities because it wants knowledge to be captured and memorized to increase productivity and smoothen job transfers to younger generations. As such they are interested in the longer term and explicit outcomes of knowledge sharing.

Sermo has implemented a very original business model, and I wish them a lot of success. This is a brilliant idea.

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