How Small Companies Compete with — and Beat — Big Ones

Harvard Business Review

24 May 2023

In an era driven by network effects, smaller players struggle to compete against bigger platforms. The trick to gaining ground on a much larger rival, says Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, is choosing a strategy that can’t easily be imitated. A good example is TaoBao’s strategy for displacing eBay in China, back in 2007.