article thumbnail

The New Agents of Market Penetrations

Harvard Business Review

Kenyan groups understand frugal engineering suitable for the local market and are carefully adapting mobile technologies with African flavors. Today, most mobile payment firms operating in Africa have Kenyan origins. This student mobility is an opportunity to accelerate technology diffusion to the developing world.

article thumbnail

How Likely Is Your Industry to Be Disrupted? This 2×2 Matrix Will Tell You

Harvard Business Review

To help business leaders better understand industry disruption, we developed an index that measures an industry’s current level of disruption as well as its susceptibility to future disruption. For the latter, we measured incumbents’ operational efficiency, commitment to innovation, and defenses against attack.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Blockchain Could Make the Insurance Industry Much More Transparent

Harvard Business Review

This gap between insurers and customers can be widened into a gulf by trust brokers, who dominate the top-heavy insurance brokerage market and benefit from its opacity and byzantine operating standards. Failure to act may consign many large players to the continuing trust deficit or, worse, irrelevance.

article thumbnail

6 Reasons Platforms Fail

Harvard Business Review

Studying these successes and failures, we’ve identified half a dozen key reasons platforms fail, all of which boil down to managers’ misunderstanding of how platforms operate and compete. He charged developers for toolkits – inhibiting the very software producers he should have wanted on Apple’s platform.

article thumbnail

Jack Welch’s Approach to Breaking Down Silos Still Works

Harvard Business Review

During these meetings, team leaders get real-time input from multiple stakeholders (marketing, product development, supply chain, finance) and then make immediate decisions about how to reduce costs and increase market penetration.

Welch 8