At last year’s Gerber Ideation, the user group for Gerber’s AccuMark and other software, fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff stated that in strategizing for her business, “We think like companies that can potentially disrupt us.” That’s a key strategy in today’s crazy world. And the irony is that Minkoff is one of those disruptors! She has leveraged digital technologies in ways others have not even thought of, such as the interactive mirrors in her stores  that let customers FaceTime with friends as they make fashion choices, allow customers to request a glass of champagne in the dressing room, and that offer up suggestions for complementary apparel and accessories (upselling at its best!).

Having covered the commercial printing industry for many years, through its own analog-to-digital transformation, I witnessed the price many printing companies paid for ignoring the Internet, considering it a fad, and continuing to do business as usual. As hard to imagine as that is, it’s true. At the same time conventional printers were ignoring the Internet and all that it foretold for their industry, entrepreneurs and angel investors jumped on the dot-com e-commerce bandwagon, and dozens of e-commerce-related businesses popped up. Many of them didn’t survive, of course, but others, like VistaPrint, did and have continued to do so over the ensuing years, at the expense of small commercial printers whose bread and butter was business cards, stationery, and other commodity-type printing that VistaPrint’s automation enabled them to profitably produce far below what was then the average market price.

On the hardware side, Xerox’s revolutionary DocuTech spawned the digital printing industry. Within a few short years, Xerox built DocuTech into a $2 billion business and virtually obliterated black-and-white offset printing.