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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. Using students to create new markets is not new. Kenya dominates the mobility ecosystem in the region.

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Megastores Want to Be Like Mom-and-Pop Shops… Sort Of

Harvard Business Review

In the words of its executive vice-president and chief merchandising and marketing officer, “This is really the year of localization.”. To protect their advantage, forward-thinking national chains are combining their brand recognition and market penetration with a local approach. There are other operational considerations.

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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.

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

Harvard Business Review

For the former, we examined the presence and market penetration of disruptor companies; we also considered incumbents’ financial performance. For the latter, we measured incumbents’ operational efficiency, commitment to innovation, and defenses against attack. Supermarkets are a case in point.

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Why Comcast Would Rather Be Feared Than Loved

Harvard Business Review

Maybe the passage of time has dulled my memory of what it was really like, or maybe the wonderfulness of the phone rep led me to believe that this was a different sort of operation. If that''s right, the cable operators will only get more aggressive about this as the years go by.

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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.

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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. For years Apple’s market penetration hung in the single digits. Failure to launch the right side.