The Decoupling Effect of Digital Disruptors by Thales S. Teixeira and Peter Jamieson, November 21, 2014. Harvard Business School Working Paper.

“While the Internet’s first wave of disruption was marked by the unbundling of digital content, the second wave, decoupling, promises to generate more casualties in an even broader array of industries. Digital start-ups are disrupting traditional businesses by inserting themselves at every juncture in the customer’s consumption chain. By decoupling-the act of separating activities that people are used to co-consuming-new digital businesses are disrupting retailing, telecom, and other industries. Decoupling allows consumers to benefit from the value created at a lower cost or effort compared to what is delivered by traditional businesses. For those companies, the only solutions are to either recouple activities or rebalance to create and capture value (i.e., revenues) from both activities separately. Here, digital technologies can be seen as an instrument that will both disrupt traditional business models and potentially preserve them.”