Enterprise IoT

Chapter 7. Ignite | IoT Strategy Execution

Many large companies find it extremely difficult to deal with disruptive paradigm shifts. This is not a new observation. In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction” as a way to describe “the free market’s messy way of delivering progress” [EC1] (actually, it can be traced back to the works of Karl Marx, but let’s not go there…). Probably the most cited example of a company that was unable to deal with disruptive technologies is Kodak. Although Kodak was one of the inventors of digital photography, the company failed to transform itself from a leader in film-based photography to the new, digital business models. Schumpeter’s gale seems like a perfect summary of the dilemma many large companies face—the inability to reinvent themselves from the inside, and the extremely fast pace at which startup companies are creating new digital businesses on the green field.

In our view, there was never a distinct, defining moment in the history of Kodak that initiated its decline—the company’s decline took more than a decade and had multiple different causes. In the context of the IoT, every company has to ask itself how much of a potentially disruptive paradigm shift the IoT represents, and how long this shift will take in its respective vertical markets. These are exactly the issues that the Ignite | IoT Strategy Execution methodology aims to address: create a better understanding of what the transformative ...