Abstract Much has been written and said about the need to be agile for businesses to transform themselves and adapt in the dynamic digital economy. This case study traces the history of a Singaporean IT firm from its inception in I993 to 20 I9. In particular. this case study illustrates how agility has enabled the company to grow from a start-up to be among the leading IT rms in Singapore albeit operating in the dynamic IT industry that has grown increasingly volatile with the emergence of disruptive digital technology and innovation. Apart from drawing insights on organizational agility and adaptation. this case study also provides illustration on the theme of entrepreneurship and leadership as manifested through the Founder and Chief Executive Ofcer. Keywords Digital business, teaching cases, is discipline, agility, innovation, IT for competitive advantage Introduction Returning from a staff retreat tour, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Elixir Technology, Lau Shih Hor, sat in his office reminiscing his entrepreneurial journey of his company repeatedly rising to the waves of disruptive digi- tal innovation in the IT industry. The entrepreneurial world had often been described as a jungle where only the ttest and smartest would survive. Elixir Technology not only survived but also excelled. Looking back, Lau was deeply gratied and thankful that his company, Elixir Technology, had come this far. He founded the company back in 1993 with his business part- ner, Jonathan Priddey, as the chief technology ofcer. Riding on Jonathan's reputation as a technology guru, the company initially started as a training and consulting rm for programmers. He still remembers how it was when the company was first founded. He and his team would fre- quently meet in the living rooms of their ats, and even at public benches at the Mass Rapid Transit stations in the city-state. Despite its humble origins, Lau led the com- pany with a strong belief that they could play a part in how technology is changing the world. Responding to market changes Keeping their eyes open to technology trends while ensuring the company generates sufcient funds and pro- vides necessary risk buffering to ensure the company achieves its long-term development ambitions was not easy. This was especially when they found out that it was difcult to be commercially viable as a training and con- sulting rm for programmers. Programmers were often independent and self-reliant. Most companies were not ready to pay for the training and consultancy services that their firm offered. Combining the visionary leadership of Lau and the strong technical expertise of Priddey, the duo decided to Switch the fetus of their rm to venture into Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) Tool, which 'RMIT University. Melbourne. Victoria. Australia 2Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore Corresponding author: SayYen Teoh, RMIT University, 445 Swanston Street. Helboume, Victoria 3000. Australia. Email: sayyen.teoh@rmir,edu.au capitalized on the rising popularity of the Java program- ming environment in 1997. As luck would have it, their feray into CASE Tools were overshadowed by the emergence of Open Source Software (USS) movement, which started to gain momentum in the late l990s. Open-source codes were publicly available, hampering the growth of Elixir's CASE Tool business. With this turn of trend in the technology space, Lau and Priddey were soon back to the drawing board to scout for new busi- ness direction, which nally saw them venturing into Business Intelligent (BI) reporting tool (Heng et al., 2017). Lau recalled that the idea for BI reporting tool was ini- tially mooted by two young programmers in the fu'm. They were thinking to further improve on existing reporting tool that were available in the market. But their idea initially received the cold shoulder from their chief information ofcer (C10). Being someone with deep technical expertise and taking great pride in doing innovative and cutting-edge work to advance the state of technology development, he viewed what they proposed to be mere 'copycat' work. If there is nothing new or innovative, he believed it would not be worth the investment of time and energy. However, Lau was more pragmatic and decided to take on the two young programmers' idea. This eventually led to the rollout of Elixir Report (ER) in 1999. ER was an enterpriseclass software application that allowed end user to query and extract data from databases and data ware- houses. It was able to present data in various graphical, tabular and textual formats as desired by the users. It was developed entirely in Java, and it allowed for scalability to suit both large and small businesses, including support for localized multilingual reporting. It was also platform-inde- pendent, to the extent that it could be used on desktop com- puters as well as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Such innovation quickly won them substantial market interest. The release of the ER was also timely as it coincided with the time when the Internet began to gain mass appeal. fuelling carporate end users' appetite to be able to access infermation easily and quickly, anytime and anywhere. Staying mindful of such market demands, Elixir further innovated on the ER through retrotting it into an enterprise-class reporting tool and relaunched it in 200]. This new version of ER was capable of multi-channel con- tent delivery to enable accurate information err-demand, anytime, anyplace. By 2003, BR was crowned as one of the top three report- ing tools by winning several awards such as Best Java Reporting Tool; Best XML Tool by the Java Developer's Journal in 2003; Best Wireless Application; and Top ve percent by JARS.com. Between 200] and 2003, Elixir's product revenue soared by ll-fold. Elixir's client base spread across almost 60 different countries and included world-famous companies such as Walt Disney. More than 60% of its clients were from overseas, with only slightly more than 30% of its clients based locally in Singapore. With revenues often tended to plateau a few years after the launch of a software product due to their relatively short product life, Elixir invested in rapid innovation. Such an approached helped it in becoming a market leader among enterprise business reporting tools globally. In 2007, ER was rebranded as Elixir Repertoire (refer to Figure 1) after incorporated business analytics and business intelligence tools. Such innovation also helped to expand its revenue growth by more than 160% from 2005 to 2007. It captured 600 customers in more than 80 countries winning four prestigious awards in 2007, which included the honour of being listed in Deloitte Technology Fast 500 the Asia Pacic, which ranks the 500 fastest growing technology companies in the region. That same year, Elixir was also crowned as the fastest growing digital company in Singapore. Being sensitive to market trends as well as being agile in responding to them had been one of Elixir's key strengths to success. With its Silicon Valley start-up culture and a relatively at organizational structure, Elixir had always been able to make quick product development decisions and proceed on to do rapid prototyping. Especially in the technology industry, the volatile nature of this business due to rapid technological innovation rendered technology rms to be nimble and adaptive. Sustaining through crisis The growth in demand for BI solutions attracted the atten- tion of the big technology rms such as Oracle, SAP, and IBM. Over a period of 4months, these big players bought over the top 3 Bl companies in the market (Heng et al., 2017). Initially, Lau thought that they would survive this round of disruption. But reality soon strikes as sales began to slow. Given his entrepreneurial instinct, Lau soon sensed that the market was making yet another signicant shift. But this time is not merely a technology shift but the global nancial crisis of 2007. During this crisis, Elixir lost most of its overseas clients to Oracle, SAP, and IBM. They lost many of their major clients, including Walt Disney. To recover from this crisis, Lau went back to the draw- ing board yet again to re-strategize Elixir next foray to thrive amid the crisis. He spent much time towards industry networking while searching for the 'next big leap' for his business, which came in the form of Cloud Computing. Elixir began to develop a cloud-based version of Elixir Repertoire using the software as a service (SaaS) model. Given the novel stage of development of Cloud Computing, Elixir found it hard to employ experienced developers who were able to create the SaaS solution. In the end, they part- nered with an external cloud services provider to develop a cloud-based version of their existing business intelligence software package. In 2010, Elixir launched Elixir Ambience, a new-generation SaaS business-analytics platform that provided ondemand scalable business-analytics applica- tions that could be tapped by other systems. Figure 2. Ambience ad hoc data visualization feature. Bizlnsights, Elixir is no longer limited to the selling of ana- lytic tools, but also ventured into the business of selling \"business insights' (hence the company name Bizlnsights). Sensing that having only data from Singapore may be too limiting in generating deep insights as most of trade and business transactions are cross-border in nature, Bizlnsights established partnerships in the Asia Pacic region to expand access to similar data of companies in the region, such as Indonesia and Japan. For example, corporations and indi- viduals could now purchase access to the databases in Bizlnsights and overlay it with Elixir Ambience to carry out their own analysis of the data to analyse for credit risk of companies, monitor competitors or identify prospective clients (refer to Figure 2). Moving beyond business intelligence The year 2014 marked yet another strategic milestone for Elixir as it moved beyond its conventional market space of business intelligence and started venturing into the devel- opment of smart solutions. This move towards smart solu- tions was timely and synergized with Singapore's Smart Nation initiative as the country pushed towards a nation wide digitization ebrt. Elixir took this as an opportunity for it to be at the fore'ont of innovating new digital innova~ tion to support the effort to develop the island state into a Riding on the new Big Data wave Smart Nation. One of the services provided by Elixir was to improve citizen engagement. Using a system built on Elixir As the new digital wave of Big Data hit the Singapore tech- Ambience, a government agency was able to track citizen's nology sector, Elixir launched a wholly owned subsidiary participation in various programmes, courses and activities BizInsights. BizInsights runs a web-based portal offering such that they could provide more effective engagement self-service reporting and analysis of official corporate data strategy including providing feedback and analysing the that are drawn from the financial statements of companies effectiveness of programmes offered (refer to Figure 3). that were filed with the Accounting and Corporate In addition, one of their other earliest digital innovation is Regulatory Authority of Singapore, over the past 80+ years. a smart queue management solution for taxi stands (Heng BizInsights seems to be a natural progression for Elixir et al., 2017). To overcome its limited talent issue, Elixir stra- as all the analytics prowess of BizInsights leveraged on the tegically partnered with two other technology firms with business-analytics platforms created by Elixir, that is, Elixir complementary capabilities in developing the smart queue Repertoire and Elixir Ambience. It is just that with management solution. One partner specialized in producinghigh-quality video sensors. The other partner specialized in mobile closed-circuit television solutions with competencies in wireless networking and image processing. Elixir contrib- uted their specialty in business analytics to the partnership. Together, through leveraging on the complementary com- petency of each partner, they developed the smart queue man- agement solution (National University of Singapore, 2017). Essentially, video sensors were installed at taxi stands to moni- tor the length and ow of taxi queues in real time. Alerts could then be sent to despatch vacant taxis to the location. At the same time, potential waiting time could also be fed to com- muters, who could then make informed decisions on their travel options. The three partnering firms each contributed their respective competencies in developing this solution. This solution was subsequently showcased at the launch of Singapore's Smart Nation Master Plan in 2014 and has also attracted a great deal of interth from other countries. Alas, this smart queue management solution was not implemented on a large scale as it was eclipsed by the pop- ularity of car-sharing services in 2014, a year aer Uber cicially entered Singapore. With Uber, most commuters no longer passively waited at taxi stands but used the Uber app to hail for rides. Learning quickly from this collaborative experience, Lau saw the strong potential for a collaborative culture ameng technology rms to work together to innovate and produce smart digital solutions not only in an expeditious manner but also in a manner that any single technology rms would nd it hard to accomplish independently. This would also enable the smaller technology rms to have a chance of producing more sophisticated digital solutions that were previously only the ambit of large technology rms. Motivated by this realization, Lau mustered the industry to work together and launched the SGTech Smart Nation Chapter in 2018. The Chapter aimed to build up and facili- tate an ecosystem of smart technology adopters and innova- tors throagh extensive industry engagement and collaboration. It allowed its alliance members to better tap on each other's expertise and solutions, which range from Internet of Things and analytics to meet the diverse needs of the customers. In 2019, Elixir ventured into yet another digital solution with partner rms. They developed a smart urban mobility solution (refer to Figure 4). This solution leveraged on technologies such as Big Data and Internet of Things to col- lect and analyses data for critical insights of public trans- portation networks. Essentially, it served as a tool for geospatial analytics to enable better urban planning and policy making. It also incorporated time-series animation maps that allowed visualization of travel patterns. Looking back at how far Elixir Technology had come since their inception in 1993, it continued to hold true to the belief that they could play a part in how technology is changing the world. Refer to Table l for Elixir Technology's Selected Key Milestones and Awards for Disruptive IT hmovations from 1993 to 2019. Table I. Elixir technology's selected key milestones and awards for disruptive IT innovations. Won the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific List Won the prestigious Asia Pacific Information and Communication Technology Alliance Won the Enterprise Won the German Middle Market Innovation Award 2007 50 Awards Elixir Report Won Sprit of Enterprise Awards SG Urban Elixir Mobility Computer-aided Repertoire with SAAS Model software out-of-the-box Video & Smart engineering features Analytics Nation Project 1993 1999 to 2005 2007 2014 2015 2016 2019 2017 Suggested questions for class discussion 3. Explain what has enabled them to be so resilient and agile. 1. What are some of the factors that contributed to the success of Elixir Technology? 4. Critique the strategy adopted by Elixir Technology 2. Explain how Elixir Technology has been able to be throughout its history. agile in adapting their business over the years