Beyond Innovation: The Crazy New World of Industrial Mash-ups

In today’s business environment, the fast-shrinking innovation cycle has availed new types of deals fit to mitigate business friction and accelerate the pace of innovation. After a first stream of disruptive tech-driven businesses which reshaped the P2P landscape and created “the sharing economy”, industrial mash-ups set themselves up as highly transformative actors, remodeling industries in a groundbreaking manner. Along with the extension of the principles of the sharing economy to the organizational level, an “emerging industrial sharing economy” steadily streams, substantively reforming the corporate ecosystem. The focus shifts from P2P to B2B flows, by means of leading-edge technologies, such as the IoT, social media, cloud computing, data mining, big data analytics, business intelligence, etc. Challenging the status quo, the interplay between technology and industrial assets promises to generate a genuine disruption in economic efficiency and productivity in various industries, especially in the asset-intensive sectors. In this way, the business landscape is expected to witness the dawn of novel actors tying together services from dynamic networks of collaborators which remap the organizational agility and capabilities, and create value via capitalizing underutilized assets, sharing specialized knowledge and building trust within the overall ecosystem. Industrial mash-ups will, thus, lay the foundation of knowledge networks which invite both people and companies to collaborate, interact, and learn from each other. What would have been once deemed as a crazy new idea, it is nowadays transforming the corporate environment, conceptually and practically puzzling the way we see the world around us.