INSEAD and Harvard Business School just validated my process with a field study of 515 startups. It’s the strategic mapping I’ve been doing with founders for decades.
The researchers gave one group of startups something the others didn’t: a look at how AI-native companies map AI into the way their work actually gets done. Not more tools. A map.
Compared with the others, that group:
Nearly double the revenue, with far less need for outside money.
My through-line for decades has been bringing strategy and emerging tech (now AI) into small founder‑led businesses. Mapping comes first. It’s the step most AI adoption skips entirely, and it’s where our Intelligent Scale™ approach begins: strategically mapping AI into the precise architecture of an existing business before adding or customizing a single AI tool.
These are the study’s results for those startups, not a promise for any one business.
Strategy leads. AI follows.
Source: Hyunjin Kim, Dahyeon Kim and Rembrand Koning, Mapping AI into Production: A Field Experiment on Firm Performance, INSEAD Working Paper 2026/20/STR.