DeBeers is the dominant player in the world diamond market.
And one way of attaining that position was by buying more or less all the supply
of many, many diamond producing countries.
So DeBeers, by buying up the supply, was able to create an essential resource or
to basically get hold and get control over an
essential resource. Supplier capacity is another essential
resource. So one interesting example here is a
small company called Minnetonka. Minnetonka invented liquid soap.
So the soap that we're using a lot now, that has more or less replaced, or almost
replaced, solid soap in many different settings.
So Minnetonka invented liquid soap but one of the problems was that this is
basically a consumer good. This is a cosmetic, that has a market
structure, or the market has a market structure, that's very much dominated by
large firms like Unilever, like Procter and Gamble and so on.
So how does a small firm like Minnetonka keep hold of the profits that can be made
from an innoviation like liquid soap? The way they did it, is not by trying to
protect liquid soap as such. They knew they wouldn't be able to do that.
But what they found out is that to make a successful product out of liquid soap
you needed small pumps, you needed plastic pumps.
And it turned out at the time of the invention of liquid soap,