Digital Winners and Losers

February 11, 2020

Read The Full Prompt

Digital technologies are upending many industries and companies. Think about Uber’s impact on the taxi business or Amazon’s impact on retail stores.

For this assignment, we would like you to identify companies/organizations that you think are winning or losing. Just work on either winners or losers. Please focus on just one organization. Tell us why they are a winner or loser. Discuss elements of how they create and/or capture value that is leading you to call them a winner or loser.

Create an approximately 750-word post to make your contribution on digit.hbs.org by 6pm on Feb 11. Please create appropriate tags for your post including if it is a “winner” or “loser.” Please also respond to and comment on three other posts. Feel free to use graphics, data, videos and links to other sites to corroborate your points.

Selected posts will be discussed in class.

Submitted (79)

Touch Surgery: The Uberization of Surgical Education
Partha Ray
Last modified on February 11, 2020 at 5:51 pm
Touch Surgery has been #winning the medical education game through its groundbreaking platform, which has expanded globally to offer step by step instructions for over 300 surgical procedures spanning 17 specialties. The platform has over 2 million users and has [...]
Intuit: Embracing the “Innovator’s Dilemma”
Reinaldo Fioravanti
Last modified on March 24, 2020 at 9:52 am
Intuit is a digital winner as it found a way to fully embrace the innovator's dilemma, and has been successful in anticipating disruptions in its industry and organically responding to them.
Bloomberg: Four victorious decades
ssingayapally
Last modified on February 10, 2020 at 11:09 pm
Founded in 1981, the Bloomberg LP revolutionized the financial services sector through technology. Nearly 40 years later, its flagship product, the Terminal, continues to dominate trading desks even as it faces a number of competitors trying to take on the [...]
Omada Health: A winning digital solution in chronic disease management
lumos
Last modified on February 9, 2020 at 5:35 pm
Omada’s digital behavioral health solution is a winning formula combining smart devices, personalized coaching, and innovative integration into existing healthcare structures to offer an outcomes-based model that improves health and lower costs.
Procore – managing the construction management space
Nicholas Dimitruk
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 12:58 am
Procore is looking to harness the digital disruption happening in construction by being the glue that holds it all together
Delta Airlines – competing on quality and winning on the price
Alexander Levinskiy
Last modified on February 12, 2020 at 12:29 am
Delta airlines has been one of the most innovative travel companies in the past few years. The company has implemented more than a dozen tech-enabled initiatives – more details on those below – aimed at four key goals: cost-cutting, increasing [...]
Wealthsimple – A Winner in Investment Management
Russell
Last modified on February 11, 2020 at 5:57 pm
Why Wealthsimple has taken the Canadian investment management industry by storm
Polaroid: Commitment Issues Led to a Breakup with the Camera Industry
HK
Posted on February 10, 2020 at 7:31 pm
It wasn’t too long ago when the only way to instantly see your pictures was with a Polaroid camera. Unfortunately, once digital photography was introduced, Polaroid was too fixated on their existing revenue streams to pivot to the wave of [...]
HBS: Potential to win at teaching digital by harnessing digital teaching
tf
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 5:55 pm
The Harvard Business School’s stated mission is “to educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” It is hard to imagine how world leaders of the future will make a difference without effectively and ethically harnessing digital tools, whether [...]
Betterment: Winning in the wealth management space
Ashima_Singh
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 4:15 pm
Betterment: Winning in the wealth management space
Highsnobiety: Writing the Digital Fashion Content Playbook, from the Street to the Runway
hbs51369394
Last modified on February 10, 2020 at 9:48 pm
From personal passion blog to street style and digital media authority, Highsnobiety created a one stop shop for 18-24 year old affluent, style-seeking males and built a B2B brand services business to show everyone else how to do it.
FedEx: Navigating disruption storms with no clear skies ahead
Leonardo Hugo Lujan
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 1:24 am
FedEx is facing the threat of two of the most severe digital disruptors: Amazon and Uber. As e-commerce operations gain more relevance in supply chain distribution networks, the tech giant is aggressively increasing the vertical integration of its distribution network. [...]
AWS: Cloudy With a Chance of World Domination
Jon Snow
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 6:07 pm
AWS led the cloud revolution, now they continue to dominate the landscape through rapid innovation and a top-notch services ecosystem.
MarketAxess: Winning via bond disruption
Sky Deck
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 5:43 pm
Cross the widely known benefits of electronic platforms with the massive but unfamiliar-to-most world of bond trading, and you get MarketAxess (Nasdaq: MKTX). The question isn’t if their fixed income marketplace will win or even when, but just by how [...]
Nubank: a fintech that finally nudges Brazil’s banking oligopoly
Fernanda Pedreira
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 6:10 pm
  Nubank is a fintech that was founded in 2013 and entered the Brazilian market to compete with traditional financial services providers. From its inception, it offered consumer credit cards that slashed annual fees and that were entirely managed by [...]
CarGurus Leaving AutoTrader and Others In Its Dust
Jesse Bendit
Posted on February 10, 2020 at 3:57 pm
The auto industry is huge and its online marketplaces provide significant value and are earning accordingly - in a winner-take-most industry, CarGurus has come out on top.
C3.ai: Stealing the Primes’ Lunch
Chris H
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 3:11 pm
C3.ai is applying ML and IoT technology to improve how the US DoD maintains billions of dollar’s worth of equipment.
All eyes on Shopify: a winner take all
Petra
Posted on February 11, 2020 at 5:50 pm
Shopify, a low-key Canadian company, started as a SAS software solution that enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to create their own customizable e-commerce websites without the need to have any prior development or design knowledge. Today, fifteen years after [...]
Nubank: Building a USD 10 billion fintech in 6 years
RicardoN
Last modified on February 11, 2020 at 4:13 pm
Nubank is the world's most valuable digital bank. This post reflects on some of the reasons why the startup was able to achieve such success.
Betterment on disrupting the financial service industry
Ulunma
Last modified on February 11, 2020 at 5:50 pm
  Unlike the disruption that we have seen in the retail space with Amazon, transportation with Uber, and movie industry with Netlflix, there isn’t a single tech firm leading the future of financial services. Betterment hopes to play that role. [...]
NAVER Webtoon: Winning through Content Crowdsourcing
vertigo
Last modified on February 9, 2020 at 5:02 pm
NAVER Webtoon is a platform that led the revolutionary transition of Comics medium from print to digital in South Korea. It leveraged a crowdsourcing mechanism to develop quality content and creators.
Daojia.com—delivered service to home
Haoran
Last modified on February 10, 2020 at 9:30 pm
Daojia (https://bj.daojia.com/) is a platform linking consumers and service providers directly. It provides different kinds of services, including massage, manicure, baby care, housekeeping and house maintenance. I view Daojia as a winner in digital area because it benefits millions of [...]
Convoy – The Future of Freight
James Eckfeldt
Last modified on February 11, 2020 at 3:56 pm
The "Uber for freight" entered the market in 2015 to disrupt an old, massive and highly fragmented industry that had not seen much change since e-mail was created. How have they gone about this transformation?
SWEAT – The Rise of Kayla Itsines’ Fitness Empire
Jane Doe
Posted on February 20, 2020 at 6:02 pm
The SWEAT App, created by fitness influencer Kayla Itsines, emerges a winner in the fitness industry’s digital revolution.
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