About the Event
Marc H. Meyer, Robert J. Shillman Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, discussed how diverse South Korean technology ventures employ technology platforming to grow from a startup to a scale-up company, specifically focusing on global expansion.
Marc serves as a “Master Mentor” for the national mentoring service, where the ventures cluster in medical technology, AI, and IoT for medical, manufacturing, and public infrastructure applications. Most ventures wish to expand beyond Korea quickly. Having not thought explicitly about product platforming before, many find that doing so greatly facilitates their global expansion by allowing them to reposition as modular, plug-in solutions that fit into the broader industry ecosystems in offshore markets.
This presentation explored conforming and nonconforming ventures from recent mentor experience. A confirming example might be an advanced diagnostic imaging system for a specific medical condition prevalent in Korea for which there is little demand in the U.S. Yet, there is substantial demand if that venture converts its core system into a platform and pivots to other medical conditions prevalent in the U.S. A nonconforming example might be XR/Media gaming products, for whom American and other foreign users adopt “as is” with little if any change other than subtitling. Who doesn't like K-drama?
From these examples, Marc revisited the platform model for early-stage firms seeking global expansion and considered platforming an enabler, driven by ecosystem structure and fitting within current dominant solutions.
About Marc H. Meyer
Marc H. Meyer is the Robert J. Shillman Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University. In 2006, he started Northeastern's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group in the D'Amore-McKim College of Business. Marc is a founder and served as the Managing Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship Education, responsible for interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education. Over the past 10 years, the Center's incubator, IDEA, has helped launch about 100 companies that have raised more than $750M in venture capital. He also leads the NSF I-Corps Site program at Northeastern, helping engineers and scientists commercialize lab technologies as new ventures. He is the Faculty Director of the new Masters in Management in Digital Healthcare Transformation being developed in partnership with the Mayo Clinic and its School of Medicine.
Marc is widely published in the field of product, service, and business model innovation and has worked with industry leaders in computing, industrial products, and consumer products around the world. He has also taken a leadership role in developing new methods for teaching entrepreneurship and has helped numerous students start their own ventures. He was co-founder of VenturCom (which became Ardence and was acquired by Citrix), a leader in real-time process control and automation software. He has also been part of the startup teams for Phase2 Software Corporation (a distributed database applications developer), and Intervista Software (a 3D worlds developer acquired by Platinum Software), and Sentillion (single sign-on for health care, acquired by Microsoft). He has consulted in a number of industries in the area of new product strategy and platform management with companies that include IBM, Hewlett Packard, McKesson, P&G, Mars Incorporated, and BAE Systems.
About the Nardone Family Conference Series
Made possible by a gift from David R. Nardone, this seminar and conference series brings scholars and practitioners to Northeastern University to share insights on emerging markets.
