Three Signals Your Industry Is About to Be Disrupted
Article

Three Signals Your Industry Is About to Be Disrupted

It’s safe to say that no industry will be left untouched by digital disruption. Is yours next?

Megan Beck and Barry Libert
MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018
Read the article

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
auto-generated audio
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Think your industry is safe from digital disruption? Think again. If you’ve got customers, you’ve also got some upstart out there who’s devising a new way to serve them. The hospitality, taxi and recruiting industries probably never imagined disruptors like Airbnb, Uber and LinkedIn, just as supermarkets and health care never expected online retailer Amazon to step into their spaces. If you want to protect your business, this MIT Sloan Management Review article with its vital analysis is a good place to start.

Summary

If your industry is heavily regulated, it’s vulnerable to digital disruption.

In the past, industries protected by substantial regulations could relax because new players were unlikely to push past the red tape. However, a lack of competition often means stagnant operations and apathy about a substandard customer experience. Such conditions create an environment ripe for disruption, particularly when new technologies that might better serve your customers remain largely unregulated.

Consider Airbnb, which blithely sidestepped regulations that had dogged the hotel industry for decades. Regulators only showed up after Airbnb ...

About the Authors

Megan Beck is the CIO and Barry Libert is the CEO of AIMatters, a company that uses machine learning to guide corporate strategy. Both are fellows at the Wharton School’s SEI Center.

Comment on this summary or Start Discussion