This paper aims at exploring a mechanism of new business development. To understand how a business develops, we move our analytical focus from the level of a focal business to the level of the “business ecosystem,†a collection of related businesses and institutions. We pay special attention to a slowly advancing component as a “reverse salient.†We comparatively examine the developmental process of the mobile music business in Japan and Korea, and show how the interactions among related businesses and music copyright institutions as a reverse salient shaped the directions and speed of the development in each country
