How Technology Creates Markets: Trends and Examples for Private Investors in Emerging Markets

Abstract

Technological progress is often associated with the creation of novel and useful products through innovation and ingenuity. Yet in several emerging markets, including low-income economies, it is often more common to adopt, adapt, and scale technologies created elsewhere.By doing so, private enterprises in these countries could use technology to create markets and expand their product and service offerings to unserved and underserved residents, a process that produces new customers, buyers, sellers, and employees. This transforms the pursuit of profits into a driver of economic growth, as well as higher productivity and living standards, and gives technology a central role in emerging market development.