Today, 60 years later, in a digital world where industry boundaries are being blurred by the day, the question posed by Levitt remains even more relevant to business leaders and their organisations.

Notice that unlike the enterprises in media - okay, Safaricom is also media company- Safaricom has leveraged its core capabilities to extend and expand its offering to customers.

While announcing the Safaricom results for the financial year ended March 2020, immediate former CEO Michael Joseph said, “we have stayed the course, given consumers more value and put the customer first by delivering relevant products and services.”

It is impossible to define Amazon in the traditional sense because it has always expanded its scope around customers and not industry or competitors.

That is what the likes of Safaricom and Amazon are doing- they continue to exploit the core while at the same time exploring the “white spaces” as business model innovation expert Mark Johnson, a cofounder of Strategy and Innovation Consultancy firm Innosight, would put it.