Jacob Korenblum on the Rise of Enterprise Digital Strategy in Emerging Markets

Over the past decade and a half, enterprise digital strategy has shifted from a back office concern to a central pillar of how organizations reach and serve people in emerging markets.

Jacob Korenblum has spent much of his career inside that shift, designing and launching digital solutions for real world challenges across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. His work has been covered by outlets including The Financial Times, Forbes, Devex, and Scientific American, and it offers a useful window into how the field has matured from a niche specialty into a discipline that shapes how entire regions access basic services.

A Strategy Built Around Real Constraints

Many enterprise strategies are designed around ideal conditions such as reliable internet, steady power, and widespread device access. Emerging markets rarely offer all three at once, and strategies built without accounting for that gap tend to fail quietly, absorbed by budgets and timelines without ever reaching the people they were meant to serve.

Early in his career, Korenblum spent time in the Middle East where he noticed something that would shape much of his later work. Internet access was scarce and expensive for many families, particularly in Palestine, yet mobile phone ownership was already high, reaching an estimated eighty percent of local residents.

That gap between connectivity and access became the starting point for a different kind of digital strategy, one built around the tools people already had rather than the tools planners assumed they should have.

This is a recurring theme in enterprise digital work across developing regions, and it remains just as relevant today as it was two decades ago. Strategies that succeed tend to start with an honest audit of existing infrastructure and behavior, then design outward from there, rather than importing a model built for a fully connected market and hoping it adapts. That audit often reveals uncomfortable truths. A country may have strong mobile penetration but weak data infrastructure.

A community may trust word-of-mouth referrals far more than any digital interface, no matter how well designed. A workforce may be accustomed to informal economic networks that a formal digital platform threatens to disrupt rather than support. Enterprise strategists who skip this step, moving straight to product design, often end up building solutions that are technically sound but practically unused.

From Observation to Organization

Recognizing a gap is one thing. Building an organization around it is another, and this is where much enterprise strategy work quietly fails even when the initial insight is correct. In 2005, Korenblum co-founded Souktel, a social venture whose name combines the Arabic words for telephone and market.

The idea was straightforward in concept and difficult in execution: connect job seekers with employers using SMS instead of requiring internet access. Over the following decade, Souktel grew into a platform used by more than five hundred thousand people across roughly thirty countries, expanding beyond employment matching into areas such as free legal advice and programs supporting women entering the workforce outside the home.

That growth illustrates a broader lesson in enterprise digital strategy. Technology adoption in emerging markets rarely scales through a single product launch. It tends to scale through trust built over years, through partnerships with local organizations who already have standing in a community, and through a willingness to expand a platform's purpose as new needs become visible.

Souktel's evolution from a single job matching tool into a broader social service platform reflects that pattern closely. A platform that starts by solving one narrow problem well earns the credibility needed to take on adjacent problems later, and that sequencing matters more than most strategy documents acknowledge.

There is also a patience element that is easy to underestimate. Ten years is a long horizon for a strategy to prove itself, particularly in sectors driven by quarterly funding cycles or short-term grant windows. Sustaining an enterprise strategy across that kind of timeline requires institutional discipline as much as technical skill, and Souktel's decade-long run across dozens of countries reflects both.

Strategy That Moves Between Sectors

Korenblum's path also shows how enterprise digital strategy skills move between sectors, and how the underlying discipline stays consistent even as the institutional context changes completely.

After more than a decade focused on nonprofit and social venture work, he shifted his focus toward the governmental and private sectors, managing digital policy development for the Government of Ontario from 2018 to 2021.

In that role, he supported the Ontario Digital Service in developing policies aimed at delivering simpler and faster digital services to residents, work that included services used more broadly across Canada during the COVID period, when government digital infrastructure was tested at a scale few had planned for.

Moving from social venture leadership into public sector policy is not a common career transition, and it highlights something important about how enterprise digital strategy actually functions as a discipline. The tools differ. A nonprofit building an SMS platform for job seekers in Gaza operates under different constraints than a provincial government building services for millions of residents during a public health emergency.

But the underlying questions remain remarkably similar. Who is currently underserved by the existing system? What do they already have access to? What would it take to meet them there rather than asking them to adapt to an unfamiliar interface? Those questions travel well between a small nonprofit and a large government agency, and Korenblum's career suggests that strategists who internalize them early can apply them across very different institutional settings later.

The through line across nonprofit, social enterprise, and government work is a consistent approach to strategy itself. Identify who is being underserved by current systems, understand what tools and constraints actually shape their behavior, and build or reform services around that reality rather than around institutional convenience or existing organizational habits.

This sounds simple stated plainly, but it is difficult to execute consistently, particularly inside large institutions where convenience and habit carry significant inertia.

As more organizations expand into emerging markets, and as governments continue to digitize services that once required in-person visits, that approach is likely to matter more, not less. Enterprise digital strategy that ignores local infrastructure and habits tends to stall, regardless of how much capital or talent is behind it.

Strategy shaped by direct observation, the kind Korenblum practiced when he noticed the gap between phone ownership and internet access in Palestine two decades ago, continues to offer a more durable model for reaching underserved populations at scale, whether the population in question is a group of job seekers in a developing country or the residents of a Canadian province navigating a new digital government service for the first time.