Traditional large companies, gained their advantage thanks to their massive deployment of scale. That however, no longer necessarily holds true. This is because of the emergence of the platform economy, and the availability of technologies that can be rented out anytime. Investments on scale has been the norm for about a century now, thanks to the development of mass media tools such as radio and television. The addition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the mix has reversed the trend, with economies of unscale set to the ushered in. An appropriate example of this is the tailored map route provided by the app Waze. Due to the lower needs of scale and size now, companies can also remain nimble. This allows them to embrace business innovations, with lesser effort committed, and at lower costs. Stripe, Airbnb and Warby Parker are examples of such unscaled companies.

Source:https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-end-of-scale/

Uploaded Date:25 January 2019