For sustained digital advantage, find a huge customer problem and create the processes that will solve it

What is it about?

Only a few firms can be said to have leveraged digital tech for maximum value. A handful of companies - Amazon, Tesla, Walmart and a few others - have created far more wealth with their digital systems than most. And the latest technologies may offer special opportunities for others to achieve very large returns with approaches like theirs. A useful way to understand the successes of each of these firms is to see that each found a truly big problem that limited customers greatly and utilized digital technology to solve it through multiple waves over decades. With the many problems customers face today and the ever more powerful technologies available to attack them, the opportunity to do what these firms did and benefit similarly is considerable.

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Why is it important?

Although the most likely route to sustained competitive advantage is solving a big problem no one else is adequately addressing, this possibility had not really been discussed in the literature. This article summarizes the opportunity and shows why it is an easier path to follow in the age of artificial intelligence than in the past.