The Red Queen Retail Race

The Red Queen Retail Race: An Innovation Pandemic in the Era of Digitization, 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 by Lewis Carroll (1871), where ’it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place’. This metaphor is illustrative for the service sector that is in a transition from ’a slow world’ towards a Red Queen race, where running faster is not enough by itself. It is changing 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 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 domestic markets across the globe. The result is a reconsideration of the role of place in a digital world.

Richard Cuthbertson, Senior Research Fellow, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Olli Aleksi Rusanen, AI Applications, IBM Finland, Lauri Paavola, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aalto University

Richard Cuthbertson is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford; Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford; and a Visiting Senior Fellow at Aalto University. Richard earned his undergraduate degree at Lancaster University Management School and his PhD at the University of Southampton. After a commercial career in distribution management and marketing operations, he became a senior lecturer at Bournemouth University before joining Saïd Business School. Richard is a past Fellow of the Finland Distinguished Professor Programme (2015-2017), was awarded the Emerald Literati Network Award for Excellence (2010), and the Pegasus Prize for eBusiness Future Insights (2006).

Olli Rusanen now works for IBM in AI Applications, where he assists retailers in digital channel management. During the research for this book, Olli was a project manager at Aalto University and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, with research interests in retail innovation, strategy, and retail adaptation to a digital environment. He has conducted several case analyses of major retail chains in European and US markets, in order to understand how resource management practices change as a result of technological change and how the firms pursue competitive advantage in an increasingly digital landscape.

Lauri Paavola is a Postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University School of Business. Before his postdoctoral research at Aalto, Lauri has worked at Stanford University as a Research Fellow (2020) and at the University of Oxford as a Visiting Scholar (2014-2016). Much of Lauri’s research and teaching has concentrated on addressing the challenges of digitalization, particularly through technological innovation and data analytics.