The Spring 2019 issue of MIT SMR takes a close look at market evolution and growth. Does a disruptive industry’s success necessarily come at the expense of another entity? Or are there mechanisms to business growth that can expand opportunities without (necessarily) spelling doom to existing systems?

The rise of ecosystems requires a new way of thinking about business: the ecosystems perspective. If we can describe this unique perspective, and clear up the myths and confusions surrounding the use of the term, we position ourselves to design strategy effectively in ecosystems.

In recent years, a handful of Chinese companies like Alibaba, Haier, and Tencent have garnered a lot of attention as they have emerged as global innovators. They are challenging the R&D strategies of foreign companies and offering lessons on how to make ideas commercially viable. But there’s another, less obvious force to be reckoned with in China: thousands of innovative companies that are quietly disrupting numerous industries and developing new products and new business models.

Platform companies with the largest user networks offer significant value for consumers. Yet total network size isn’t the only key to competitive advantage; platform users may place equal or greater weight on having access to specific, local, or higher-quality platform users or information about the network or its participants.

Scholars have argued for years that high levels of diversification harm company performance and value creation. But multi-business companies can do quite well. Those that thrive tend to do three things: They limit the number of business models in their portfolio and support them with a cohesive operating model. They tailor the corporate parenting strategy to the needs of individual business units. And they allocate resources according to the role played by each business unit.

Many B2B companies seek to grow beyond traditional product lines by venturing into new services. Yet they often overlook the opportunity to capture sales from free services they provide. This article outlines the free-to-fee, or F2F, service transition. It shows how to inventory free services (categorizing them as profit drains, distributor delights, competitive weapons, or gold nuggets) and lays out a path for profitably generating revenues.

Platform companies continue to surprise and challenge conventional approaches to creating value. The 2018 MIT Platform Strategy Summit brought together innovative leaders who are playing a major role in the changing digital economy. Learn from their experience with five major principles for creating new value with platforms.

Each month, the MIT SMR Strategy Forum poses a single question to our panel of experts in the fields of business, economics, and management. This month’s question asks our panel whether ride-sharing platform Uber must develop a self-driving car capability to remain viable in the market.

The most popular articles from the MIT SMR archive reflect the depth and range of management challenges our readers face in areas such as innovation, leadership, strategy, and technology. Authors of these “must reads” include MIT Sloan faculty Nelson Repenning and Donald Sull, plus Clayton Christensen, Albert Segars, Michael Schrage, Sam Ransbotham, David Kiron, Philipp Gerbert, and Martin Reeves.

AI’s largest and most enduring contributions will be in non-technology sectors, and many of them will come from China. Buoyed by the country’s latest five-year plan and enabled by centralized data, Chinese companies are investing aggressively in AI and adapting their business models to make the most of AI’s potential, but unclear business cases and bottlenecks due to lacking technical capabilities hinder adoption.

Emerging technology and new business models have created new ways of serving customers and allowed digital leaders to disrupt traditional companies. Disruption rarely comes out of nowhere, however: There are common patterns to learn from and three major signals to recognize in evaluating the risk for your industry.

At the same time that many traditional retailers are closing offline stores, digitally native vertical brands such as Bonobos and Warby Parker are aggressively expanding into offline locations. And both online and offline retailers are converging in experience-oriented “showrooms.”

For more than a century, economies of scale made the corporation an ideal engine of business. But now, a flurry of important new technologies, accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI), is turning economies of scale inside out. Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of size are turned on their head.

The sharing economy isn’t all bad news for manufacturers of big-ticket items such as cars. Research from Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley says that manufacturers will sometimes be able to charge higher prices to customers who are planning to rent out those goods. In a Q&A, one researcher says that when there’s heterogeneity in the market, meaning both a high-usage population and a low-usage population, circumstances are ripe for “a win-win-win for the borrower, the owner, and the manufacturer.”

Many of today’s most successful companies are able to leverage business model scalability to achieve profitable growth. Executives need to factor scalability attributes into their business model design or they risk being left behind.

Executives often look at the network effects of digital platforms as a key source of competitive advantage — without understanding that platforms need to also leverage other factors at play in the local markets and among preferred customers. Network effects can help, but on their own, they offer very limited competitive value.

Companies today will have to reinvent themselves to survive, and every large and ambitious company should be trying to figure out how to become a destination for its customers. Consumers are voting with their mobile devices and choosing from a handful of dominant “ecosystem drivers”— businesses such as Amazon and WeChat, which become destinations for their customers’ needs by offering complementary or sometimes competing services — for each domain in their lives.

Although traditional financial services companies now offer mass-market financial advice via “robo-advisers,” average U.S. customers seeking investment advice are still underserved — and platform-based digital powerhouses like Amazon are taking notice.

Throughout the 20th century, autos and the auto industry propelled human development, bringing unrivalled utility and flexibility to the way people move. Yet the industry now faces fundamental disruption as vehicle ownership yields to on-demand mobility.

Business success today requires taking part in open platform ecosystems. But too many world-class product and services companies find their platformization quests narrowly defined, and end up with constricted or conflicted implementations. The ability of information systems and devices to exchange data isn’t enough in and of itself. Instead, developing new capabilities is the key to platform innovation that will add value to an organization.