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Legacy companies don’t have to choose between blowing up their business or getting steamrolled by digital-native rivals — there’s a middle path, and INSEAD is teaching it.

In a 2017 briefing for INSEAD Executive Education, professor Nathan Furr reframes what “hybrid” actually means for a company staring down technological disruption. It isn’t about splitting a business between a nonprofit arm and a commercial one, and it isn’t about running stores alongside a website. Furr, who directs INSEAD’s Leading Digital Transformation and Innovation program, uses the video to lay out a specific playbook for how established firms can blend what already works with what digital demands — without torching the core business to get there.

• Nathan Furr, INSEAD professor and Programme Director of the school’s Leading Digital Transformation and Innovation executive program, delivers the framework in the video “Hybrid Business Models | INSEAD,” published May 24, 2017.
• Furr defines the concept precisely: “a hybrid business model is about combining different components of your business model in a new way that helps you learn and leap into a digital future.”
• The framework centers on blending existing operational strengths — legacy revenue, distribution, customer relationships — with digital mechanisms like platform strategies, data-driven services, and reconfigured value chains.

A Different Definition of Hybrid

Most people hear “hybrid business model” and think of a company that’s part charity, part commercial enterprise, or a retailer that sells both online and in physical stores. Furr’s video throws that assumption out. His use of the term is narrower and more tactical: it’s about how an established company recombines the pieces it already has — pricing, distribution, customer data, service delivery — into new configurations that point toward a digital future, rather than keeping everything static or ripping it all out at once.

“A hybrid business model is about combining different components of your business model in a new way that helps you learn and leap into a digital future.”

Legacy Firms Struggle With Disruption

The stakes Furr is addressing aren’t abstract. Established companies with decades of operational history routinely get outmaneuvered by smaller, digital-first competitors who move faster and carry none of the legacy infrastructure. The video positions the hybrid approach as the corrective: a way for incumbents to avoid getting caught flat-footed by disruption while still protecting the revenue and operations that keep the lights on.

Learning to Leap, Not Jump

Furr’s phrase “learn and leap” is deliberate. Rather than an abrupt, high-risk pivot — the kind of all-or-nothing digital transformation that can sink a company if it misjudges the market — the hybrid model treats digital change as something to be tested and proven out in stages. Firms can layer in platform mechanics or data-driven services alongside their existing operations, see what sticks, and adjust before committing fully.

That staged approach shows up across the kinds of transformations Furr’s INSEAD program covers more broadly. Businesses examining how digital-first competitors carve out margin — or how new technology reshapes entire supply chains, the way the chip shortage reshaped manufacturing dependencies — face the same core problem: how do you adapt without betting the whole company on an unproven bet.

Managing Uncertainty While Keeping the Core Intact

The practical upside Furr describes is risk management. By running hybrid experiments — a data-driven service line here, a platform feature there — a company can systematically test new digital capabilities against real market response instead of guessing. That lets leadership manage uncertainty deliberately, rather than either freezing in place or lurching into a transformation they can’t walk back. It’s the same instinct driving broader conversations about how established industries respond when new technology threatens to obsolete the old model, a theme Martin Ford explores in his own take on a future without traditional jobs.

For companies working through exactly this kind of shift, INSEAD’s broader library of case material sits under the school’s own hybrid business model coverage, where Furr’s framework gets applied across different industries facing the same digital squeeze.

Furr’s larger point in the video is that the hybrid model isn’t a permanent state — it’s a transition mechanism. Companies use it to iteratively work toward long-term digital viability while their core business keeps generating the cash that funds the experiment. Skip the hybrid phase, and a legacy firm either stalls out defending the old model or gambles everything on a leap it hasn’t tested.