In the digital world, companies need to become a destination for customers. The key is using digital as differentiation and offering customers something compelling. This requires a new playbook for how to do business as well as new ways of engaging customers. The trend is for individual and business customers to prefer just one or two powerful ecosystems in each industry, raising the stakes for leaders to better understand their options and clarify their own game plans.

Emerging technology and new business models have created new ways of serving customers and allowed digital leaders to disrupt traditional companies. Disruption rarely comes out of nowhere, however: There are common patterns to learn from and three major signals to recognize in evaluating the risk for your industry.

The ability of digital technologies to accelerate business is giving rise to new value propositions — new ways to eliminate hassles and create solutions. But research from MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research suggests that while business leaders need to start redesigning their existing systems and roles to better solve customers’ problems, they will not be able to do so quickly. Case in point: The slow and steady digital transformation of Dutch technology company Royal Philips.

Data from MIT SMR’s research suggests corporate leaders may need a reality check on the threat level posed by evolving digital technologies. Quite a few executives see the opportunities and potential for digital technologies — but most don’t recognize the threat posed by failing to respond fast enough.

Responding to a recently published essay, an MIT SMR reader pushed back against the view that managers must prepare for radical and rapid change in a digital world; he argued that this position may be overly alarmist. The discussion continues.

There was once a time when middlemen were indispensable. Intermediaries facilitated transactions between makers and buyers; they closed the gaps between disconnected entities that required one another for survival; and, within organizations, they interpreted high-level corporate strategy and connected it to front-line execution. But one by one, such intermediaries are being made obsolete by technology.

In his new book, WTF?, Tim O’Reilly takes issues with the vogue for disruption. “The point of a disruptive technology is not the market or competitors that it destroys. It is the new markets and the new possibilities that it creates,” he writes.

Throughout the 20th century, autos and the auto industry propelled human development, bringing unrivalled utility and flexibility to the way people move. Yet the industry now faces fundamental disruption as vehicle ownership yields to on-demand mobility.

Creating innovative products and services that disrupt the status quo requires creativity, and creativity involves thinking differently about constraints. But too much of a “the rules don’t apply to us” attitude can lead to ethical crises. That’s what’s happened at Uber, where a string of controversies led to a mass exodus of executives, including the company’s president and CEO. Organizations intent on innovating need to understand ahead of time the consequences of breaking certain rules.

The key problem facing organizations with respect to digital disruption is the different rates at which people, organizations, and policy respond to technological advances. The gaps between innovations and their adoption — and organizations’ ability to adapt — pose a challenge for companies.

Innovation is an ongoing challenge for managers — so MIT SMR has combed through the archives to find 12 essential innovation insights, looking for older articles that today’s MIT SMR readers might have missed but that still retain wide relevance.

Although digitization’s disruptive influence is growing rapidly, there’s surprisingly little empirical evidence on the magnitude of digital disruption — nor any showing how companies are reacting on a broad scale. A new global survey of C-suite executives looks at how digitization unfolds across industries and how incumbents are responding. With some notable exceptions, the answer is: “Not well.”

Deep learning and neural networks have dramatically improved in effectiveness and impact, leading to human-level performance in many aspects of vision, conversational speech, and problem-solving. But there is a backlash brewing.

Too many big companies are formulating their growth strategies using traditional planning approaches — yearly cycles, historical analytics, incremental thinking. The velocity that characterizes this new digital economy means this kind of growth planning is obsolete. To assert digital dominance, big companies need to capitalize on their ability to do things the disruptors can’t — like plan globally and mobilize considerable resources.

Global, social, and marketplace shifts are doing much more to transform the nature of work, how we work, and how organizations in both the private and public sector can best adapt to rapid global change. So how can organizations find new ways to avoid becoming saddled with legacy processes, technologies, and ways of thinking?

If you want to lead your organization’s technology transition, the first step is grasping the realities of digital transformation — rather than getting seduced by the hype.

With investments in Big Data bearing fruit, what do executives expect from the future? A new survey finds that artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly emerging avenues for innovation — and disruption. Nearly half of senior executives surveyed, from companies like American Express, Disney, Ford Motors, and General Electric, see disruptive change coming fast.

When faced with an emerging technology, many companies have trouble responding — not because they don’t recognize how it impacts their business, but because they have difficulty managing the uncertainty around the new technology’s competitive viability. And when the technology significantly disrupts the company’s existing business, it can create structural impediments to pursuing opportunities.

In a fast-changing digital landscape, companies shouldn’t wait too long to reconfigure their offerings — but they also should be wary of moving to an untested technology too soon. Monitoring trends in related industries and identifying high-potential startups for acquisition helps to ensure appropriate timing for business model changes.