Scaling Up Beyond Walls: Discovering New Revenue Streams Completed Research

Disruptive technologies, such as analytics, cognitive, and Internet of Things (IoT), are currently trending and rapidly changing competitive landscapes, destroying organizations that are unable to adjust. As competition increases across industries, profit margins are shrinking forcing organizations to find creative solutions that require minimal investment. Our study describes how a large, established distribution organization adjusted beyond its core competencies to bootstrap a trailer advertising project, and subsequently co-created an analytics solution to scale up the project. We used grounded theory as the method, and absorptive capacity as the framework to analyze the results. We found that organizations need to embrace change and failure for a successful analytics implementation. This can be overcome by co-creating solutions with an analytics vendor. Our findings contribute to the literature on absorptive capacity and co-creation.