Have you given up on innovation? MIT’s Michael Schrage says that can be fatal to any company, no matter the industry.

Schrage offers an interesting counterpoint to a famous statement by Columbia Business School’s Bruce Greenwald, who said, “In the long run, everything is a toaster.” Schrage disagrees, citing the evolution of two-sided toasting (1919), toaster ovens (1950s) and digital toasters (1990s), among other advances.

And Schrage says the opportunity for innovation can be especially ripe in industries that appear to be commoditized. “Price wars for products don’t necessarily mean that innovation has reached its limit;” he says, “but the low prices could be a signal that more advances are needed.”

Even in the mundane world of toasters, the playing field is continually changing. How are you using innovation to change the dynamics of your industry?

I used to work for NW Ayer, one of America’s oldest advertising agencies. Ayer was responsible for many memorable campaigns, including AT&T’s “Reach out and touch someone.” Of course, that was back in the day when AT&T was synonymous with the landline telephone (and when you didn’t have to use the word “landline” to describe it).

How far we’ve come. Through three decades of turbulent change, today’s AT&T still has 30 million landline customers. Incredibly, however, the company’s wireless customer base is more than two-and-a-half times as large, at 77 million. If there ever was an example of an industry experiencing changing dynamics (see Chapter 3 of When Growth Stalls) this is it.

The challenge facing AT&T’s current management is staying relevant in an increasingly changing marketplace. That’s why their exclusive partnership with Apple on the iPhone was such a boon to subscriber growth. But nobody’s sitting still in this industry, and growth is never guaranteed. Especially in turbulent times.

In the wake of the wakes for the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, newspapers may finally be awakening to the fact that for too long they’ve been in the railroad business while a host of new transportation options have sprung up around them.

Newspapers do have a number of unique advantages–local newsrooms, longstanding reputations, deep-rooted community contacts–but as long as they insist on an outmoded distribution model they’re going to continue to shrink.

That said, their task is not as easy as simply porting their cargo over to a different vehicle (namely, the web). It will take repackaging, refreshing and rethinking exactly what “product” they provide, and to whom. That’s why I found comments made by the Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz so refreshing. He says, “For years, publishers and editors have asked the wrong question: Will people pay to access my newspaper content on the Web? The right question is: What kind of journalism can my staff produce that is different and valuable enough that people will pay for it online?”

For too long the Fourth Estate has thought itself immune to the laws of commerce. Alas, as the newspapers above (and the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and dozens of others) are discovering, people seeking news, analysis and enlightenment have more options than ever.

While it may pain them to think of themselves as a (gasp) business, traditional newspapers have tremendous brand equity. As the dynamics of their industry continue to evolve, they can keep watching that equity whither away or take bold steps to remain relevant. “All the news that’s fit to print” is rapidly becoming an anachronism.

Tom Bolger died last week.

Bolger was the first CEO of Bell Atlantic, one of the companies formed by the breakup of the old AT&T. Reading his obituary, I was struck by something he said way back in 1983: “Right now we largely transfer only voices. But if the information age is as real as competent sociologists tell us, and you start imagining the transfers of data by all these people, the business could be immense.” That, as it turned out, may have been the understatement of the decade. It was all the more remarkable by the fact that Bolger made it a dozen or so years before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet.

Changing dynamics are a given in the modern economy. Not all of Bolger’s strategies at Bell Atlantic panned out, but he knew his charge wasn’t to preside over a telephone company—it was to keep Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) at the forefront of the communications business. That kind of thinking makes me pause and wonder what’s around the bend in my industry. That can only be a good thing.