Digital Disruption at The Vikatan Group: A Case of Adaptation and Strategic Persistence

The case traces the digital journey of the Vikatan Group, a Tamil media conglomerate in India. The case can be used to build a process-based framework for ensuring organizational longevity, especially when the environment is dynamic. Vikatan faced a continuous onslaught of technological changes which at first sight are peripheral to the magazine publishing industry. However, these digital disruptions later became the defining media for news and entertainment. Vikatan made some decisions early on to follow where its customers went. It encouraged low stakes experiments with new technology. It ensured that the top management was open to inputs from the successes/failures of the experiments. Finally, it built flexibility into its organizational core to ensure that it successfully overcame the digital disruptions. The case provides the facts of this digital journey and helps the student identify how organizational longevity can be built into the firm through conscious strategic decision making.