Exploring Lean-Agile Adoption in Publishing: MVBs, Porous Books and Feedback Loops

As publishing looks for ways to adapt to a more complex twenty-first-century marketplace, there have been sporadic calls for the industry to adopt lean, agile, or lean-agile approaches as a way of becoming more customer-centric. Despite these calls, which include some existing academic interest in the proposition, publishing scholars have not yet mounted enough of a sustained study of what a lean and agile approach might mean for business models within the industry. To blur things further, it is not always clear whether the calls that have been made thus far refer to an understanding of lean, agile, or lean-agile in the sense of the intentional, proactive feedback-driven process improvement approach that has more recently been synonymous with software engineering and interaction design in recent decades but which predates it, or other senses merely reflecting the general adjective or common noun sense of the terms, or merely signifying a general idea of business flexibility. One problem with this lack of clarity is that it does not acknowledge that it is this former approach that has proven to be effective in handling complex business scenarios involving the kind of uncertainty fostered by fragmented markets and complicates our understanding of whether publishing could or would be able to gain potential benefits through the adoption of lean-agile approaches. This research represents a preliminary attempt to address this gap from several angles. I conclude that a lean-agile approach could benefit publishing as it seeks to navigate the choppier waters of the contemporary publishing marketplace. However, I also note that there are industry barriers that may impede such adoption, concluding that such a move is likely best understood as being only part of a concurrent solution alongside more traditional strategies.