New Markets, New Opportunities: Identifying Where and How to Make Your Play

How do leaders determine whether to build a new business around a promising new technology?

- Kartik Hosanagar and Ramayya Krishnan

How do they adapt innovative approaches from one context to an entirely new opportunity? How can they engage more effectively with startups carving out new market niches?

The gold rush around generative AI has many organizations considering how they might directly leverage it into new offerings.

Kartik Hosanagar and Ramayya Krishnan dissect the technology stack behind large language models such as ChatGPT to identify the emerging market opportunities. Their analysis points to the tech giants behind the models as the likely beneficiaries of the biggest rewards — and well positioned to defend against new LLM providers.

Meanwhile, the imperative to improve health care delivery, with lower costs and better outcomes, has created a nascent market for digital health care platforms. Researchers Marcus Holgersson, Joakim Björkdahl, Anna Essén, and Johan Frishammar found that the general best practices that have proved successful for digital platforms in other business contexts are less useful in the context of health care. The much-sought network effects that drive growth in other platform businesses aren’t a factor in this space, and regulation makes the problem of ecosystem orchestration more challenging. The authors’ research sheds light on how platform strategy must evolve as it is applied to solve new problems in new markets.