The Red Queen Retail Race: An Innovation Pandemic in the Era of Digitization

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.