Assignment Question:
A. YOUR TASK
Drawing on appropriate academic and practitioner literature, you should choose an industry or organisation where incumbents are facing disruption from digital platforms. Here are some examples across multiple sectors, please try and find your own idea within your area of experience, originality will be rewarded:
 Asda tyres / Blackcircles.com vs. Tyre retailers
 Banks vs Fintech lenders (eg.Kickstarter, fanbacked.com)
 Insurtech vs traditional insurance firms
 Universities vs Coursera
 Driverless cars vs chauffeurs
 Tom Tom satnavs vs Google maps
 Party gaming vs casinos
 Health clinics vs Fitbit
 Spotify vs broadcast radio
 Netflix vs movie theatres
 Tinder online dating vs singles bars
 rover.com vs dog boarding kennels
 tyde.co vs traditional funeral firms
 Upwork / taskrabbit vs temping agencies
 Etc. etc.

Guidelines
Working individually, you should prepare an academic paper of maximum length 3500 words excluding references – 10% margin e.g. 3150 – 3850 words. By way of guidance, a typical approach would contain :
 Identification of the organisation(s) or industry under disruption. You can choose a broad industry focus involving large players (eg..Alibaba, AirBnB) but be careful as this is quite hackneyed and originality may be a problem. You could trace the history of the development of a successful platform (eg. Headspace.com, upwork.com), a failed platform endeavour (eg. Sidecar, Uber / EBay in China). Alternatively, you could draw on your own experience of potential or ongoing disruption from platform businesses in a sector or industry where you have worked (eg. Tyde.co vs. incumbent funeral firms; insurtech vs. incumbent insurance companies; Asda tyres vs. incumbent tyre dealers).
 Using appropriate conceptual frameworks, identify the before and after state
explaining the disruptive effect of technology
 Critically analyse the strategies of the disrupter(s)? Refer to the principles of platform design from the course book eg. How the platform owners managed network effects, how they overcame the chicken / egg problem and how did they decide on platform monetisation?
 Analyse the response strategies of the incumbents vs the disrupters
 Identify the ongoing repercussions of the disruption on the stakeholders (negative / positive) including social responsibility