New Emerging Industries and Alternative Pathways into Global Value Chains: the Case of Estonian Automated Mobility and Delivery Industry

Global value chains (GVC) framework provides an analytical tool to unravel development and upgrading trajectories for businesses from catching-up economies. At the same time, the catching-up literature tends to portray the upgrading in emerging economies as a gradual and linear process. Considering the digital transformation-driven trends in global value chains (GVCs) and the rise of new emerging industries, we show how small start-ups from catching-up economies can redefine the traditional pathways for entering and upgrading in GVCs. Based on three cases from the automated mobility and delivery industry in Estonia, we show how small start-up companies can achieve rapid global outreach not only via functional but also product-related, inter-sectoral, and end-market upgrading by specializing in novel niche value propositions and by building business models around digital platforms to reap the benefits from the network effects. As a result, the analysed companies have not faced established and occupied value chains, where latecomer manufacturers tend to enter, but have managed to shape and control their value chains by directing the developments on local as well as international levels, and paradoxically, without much policy support.