For more than a century General Electric made most of its revenue by selling industrial hardware and repair services. But in recent years GE was at increasing risk of losing many of its top customers to nontraditional competitors—IBM and SAP on the one hand, and big-data start-ups on the other. Those competitors aimed to shift the customer value proposition away from acquiring reliable industrial equipment to deriving new efficiencies and other benefits through advanced analytics and algorithms based on the data generated by that equipment. The trend threatened to turn GE into a commodity equipment provider.

A version of this article appeared in the November 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.