Digitization enables continuously increasing automation in business execution, operations, and decision making. As a matter of course, this not only opens up numerous opportunities for major improvements, for example in productivity, but, when certain thresholds are reached, fundamentally changes the nature of the business. It therefore also brings numerous risks, challenges, and threats, including competitive and disruptive threats, from both existing players operating new business models and/or from new, digitally native, entrants. Over the past 10-20 years, many companies, even whole industries, fallen by the wayside attest to the power of “digital”. And while the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) are flirting with trillion dollar valuations, other major companies in key industries are fighting for survival, including in automobiles or banking.  But the digitization impact is felt in subtler ways as well, for example in the way it is changing the ecosystem around capital goods and machinery OEMs, their customers and their (independent) dealers, distributors or service providers by starting to gnaw at a symbiotic relationship that has existed for decades.

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