Last Wednesday I was at the ASSOCHAM Packaging Summit 2012 giving a talk on the new opportunities for the packaging industry. Very wisely (as I would discover at the event), at the outset, I decided to eschew the usual Packaging related topics. i.e. innovation, new trends, numbers, stats etc. Instead, I talked about how the Packaging Industry could look beyond the traditional confines of rigid, flexible packaging etc. and look at their business as a service. If you rewind a little over a hundred years or so, you will see the example of Levi's. Levi's made his fortune during the original California gold rush supplying riveted jeans. And then fast-forward a hundred years from there, you have Bill Gates, who made his fortune by providing tools for the information age. As you would have guessed from the title, the analogy I drew was that in any gold rush, people who provide infrastructure (Amazon/Microsoft Cloud anyone?) are the ones most likely to walk away with the prize