Smart Rivals: How Innovative Companies Play Games That Tech Giants Can't Win

A new, researched-based look at how traditional or smaller companies can better compete with Big Tech on their own terms--from a Harvard Business School professor and a former Bloomberg journalist.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation.

In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

Zhu and Cao bring readers across the globe, revealing how big conglomerates--Coca-Cola, Ping An, and AB InBev--and scrappy upstarts--an Italian toll payment platform, a Chinese footwear retailer, a Nigerian media company, and scores of others--have managed to thrive by tapping into their unique capabilities.

Based on original research and insights gleaned from leaders in a wide-range of industries, Smart Rivals will help you find new capabilities that mere imitation could never provide and lead to new products, services, strategies, and advantages.

Feng Zhu, MBA Class of 1958 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, is an expert on platform strategy, digital transformation, and innovation. He codirects the Platform Lab at the Digital, Data, and Design Institute at Harvard. Bonnie Cao is a financial journalist-turned-business researcher at HBS's Asia-Pacific Research Center, broadly interested in digital innovation and transformation. Prior to her research career, she was the emerging markets correspondent for Bloomberg based in New York, after earlier establishing the company's real estate and hotel beat in China.

Connect with Feng Zhu on LinkedIn and at Harvard Business School. Connect with Bonnie Cao on LinkedIn.