Achieving Market Leadership: The Next Challenge for Technology Firms from Growing Countries

Technology industries tend to follow a “winner-takes-all” model where the whole market belongs to an oligopoly of firms. Those companies are achieving an overriding position with a product or service whose dominant design is adopted by an overwhelming number of customers and makes it a de facto market standard. We have identified seven different moves used by the firms from the developed world to push their technology-intensive solutions to the market so that they become indisputable leaders. They offer a compatible or open technology to generate increasing returns; besides they create a supportive network; they also actively promote their technology through an aggressive branding; they go after the global market in order to reach the maximum volume of users; they minimize their production costs in order to lower their price and get to new customers; finally they constantly invest more than their competitors in order to reach a critical mass which make their solution unavoidable. Technology industries have long been dominated by companies from the developed world. However in the recent years, new players are coming from growing economies, especially from China for high tech products and India for technology services. In this paper, we will explore how those technology companies from growing countries -mostly China and India- can also apply those different actions in order to reach market leadership