Besides their newly released app, what's proprietary about this business? What would stop a big coffee company from replicating this at a cheaper cost?
Wheelys implicitly depends on vendors violating zoning/permitting regulations. Starbucks can't get involved with those brand/legal risks, unless Wheelys and similar companies lead to a new regulatory environment (a la Uber) where Starbucks can then enter the market or acquire Wheelys.
Yeah, I had the same question. Starbucks will likely watch to see if this is successful, and if they are will either acquire them or release their own version with MANY more advantages on their side.
Don't get me wrong, I love seeing folks try to compete against entrenched businesses, but there isn't really any sort of major proprietary "moat" here.
Big companies really can't innovate. Its just the law of nature, in order to grow by 10%+ Y/Y they can't serve new markets (they just don't grow quickly enough). So in exchange they buy the successful startups and pay a premium.
That's way too broad a statement and I don't agree with using "innovate" to mean "hockey stick".
While I generally agree that it's harder for big companies to innovate I think the key is to segregate the company into smaller units (Gladwell's "magic number 150").
There's plenty of innovation from huge companies that don't depend on takeovers.
Bell Labs is probably the most common example.
I will agree that innovate does not mean hockey stick, and I appreciate the clarification; I meant to convey "disruptively innovate" and that happens extremely rarely as a native occurrence in bigcos.
I also agree about the "segregate the company" idea; for example Amazon silos its innovation units into separate companies with separate campuses to compensate for the natural organizational dynamic.
But I do not know about the history of Bell Labs (except its prestigious accomplishments) and what enabled it to be so effective. Perhaps there is a telling history book?