Author Description

This book considers how innovation through technological change has been transforming the retail sector in different markets, and how such change has been accelerated through the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The book is inspired by Alice's encounters of the Red Queen's race in the classic novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871), where 'it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place'. This metaphor is illustrative of the service sector, which is in a transition from 'a slow world' towards a Red Queen Race, where running faster is not enough by itself. This is creating a revolution in how a consumer society operates, replacing investment in the physical confines of products, stores, and geographical areas with investment in the apparently unbounded digital universe of information, relationships, and social networks. Online and mobile services enable new entrants to bypass investments in fixed assets and to avoid regulatory issues by employing new business models. By leveraging such advantages, technologically driven international competition has created substantial challenges for established retailers and service providers in markets across the globe. The result is a recognition of the importance of place in a digital world. The core research for this book was carried out by the faculty at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Aalto University, and the University of Jyväskylä. The authors thank TEKES, the Finnish Innovation Agency, now Business Finland, for its support in funding the main research.