Imagine that an online retail company called BuyIT has been implementing its own order delivery solution. It developed an innovative algorithm to optimize its couriers’ delivery routes and thus is able to charge lower delivery fees than its competitors.

One day, another company—DeliverIT—disrupts the delivery industry. It claims it has solved the “traveling salesman” problem and provides path optimization as a ser‐ vice. Not only is DeliverIT’s optimization more advanced, it is offered at a fraction of the price that it costs BuyIT to perform the same task.

From BuyIT’s perspective, once DeliverIT’s solution became available as an off-the- shelf product, its core subdomain turned into a generic subdomain. As a result, the optimal solution became available to all of BuyIT’s competitors. Without massive investments in research and development, BuyIT can no longer gain a competitive advantage in the path optimization subdomain. What was previously considered a competitive advantage for BuyIT has become a commodity available to all of its competitors.