Rubicon began with a bold idea: create a cloud-based, full-service waste management platform, providing efficient service anywhere in the US. Their mobile app did for waste management what Uber had done for taxi service. Five years after the case’s publication, Harvard Business School Associate Professor Shai Bernstein and Rubicon founder and CEO Nate Morris discuss how the software startup leveraged technology to disrupt the waste industry and other enduring lessons of professor Bill Sahlman’s case about Rubicon.
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This paper shows how the vertical-to-horizontal transition in the computer industry was an organizational response to a change in economic rewards brought by the competing technologies of rationalized step processes and open platform systems. The spread of modular architectures—and the rapid pace of change in semiconductor technology—shifted the balance of rewards away from predictability toward flexibility.
Explaining the Vertical-to-Horizontal Transition in the Computer Industry
This paper shows how the vertical-to-horizontal transition in the computer industry was an organizational response to a change in economic rewards brought by the competing technologies of rationalized step processes and open platform systems. The spread of modular architectures—and the rapid pace of change in semiconductor technology—shifted the balance of rewards away from predictability toward flexibility.