How to Compete as a Small Player in a Market Dominated by Big Platforms

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Ali Baba: I have a few go-to cases that I just love teaching. The Taobao case is about an underdog in an industry landscape dominated by big platforms. He says it explores the possibilities of how you compete as a smaller player against a big platform. "I think people will really enjoy listening to the story about Taobao," he says.

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.