The German photovoltaic industry is in chaos. Overwhelmed by the boom of solar home systems, the government has had to brutally halt subsidies whose costs were threatening to… go through the roof. Caught between Chinese competition and the falling price of solar panels, several of the flagships of this young industry are now on the brink of bankruptcy. After having enjoyed a heyday of several years, the sector suddenly has to adjust to new conditions. And, if it hopes to recover, must adapt.
Thirty years ago, with a few colleagues, a young engineer based in Bangalore founded a software company that was to become a global giant in the world of computing. Last year, Narayana Murthy relinquished his position as president of Infosys. In an interview to ParisTech Review, he re-examines elements that paved the way to success – elements that cannot be dissociated from transformations in contemporary India.
The video game industry is full of paradoxes. The sector is booming and prospects have never been better. However, companies live in a state of constant stress. Faced with the extreme volatility of consumer habits, their competition is merciless. To wage these commercial wars, they are developing business strategies that are as inventive as their most popular games' scenarios.
Innovation is the result of constant information exchanges between technology, the markets, an innovation team, as well as other departments of the firm. How can we speed up these exchanges within big companies? Nicolas Bry (Orange – Innovation Marketing Group) suggests creating small dedicated structures led by innovation professionals with specific management methods. Then the question becomes: how to insert their work into group strategies?
How do we ensure that exponential increases in demand for bandwidth continue to be met both today and tomorrow? What hurdles must be overcome in the race to deploy ultra-high speed networks in the face of a less than favorable economic climate? Reflection on Europe provides fertile grounds for debate over some of the more delicate issues which, at their heart, revolve around new approaches toward network management and a more pragmatic idea of the network neutrality principle.
When new technologies change the world, some companies are caught off-guard. Others see change coming and are able to adapt in time. And then there are companies like Kodak – which saw the future and simply couldn't figure out what to do. Kodak's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on January 19 culminates a long series of missteps, including a fear of introducing new technologies that would disrupt its highly profitable film business.
The growth in unconventional hydrocarbons has passed from adolescence and is approaching an age of maturity. Yet, optimism must be offset the concerns for those living closest to the revolution. Glancing back over the North American and Australian experiences some preliminary conclusions can be drawn. While best practices are making a contribution to sustainable production the equation will remain incomplete without fearless public debate of the subject.
Information is more abundant than ever. Day after day, the flood of data is growing at exponential rates. Barely ten years ago, the main issue for politics and industries, was to hold a firm grip on this daunting explosion. Today, the challenge consists in being able, in real-time, to take advantage and transform into value massive swaths of data.
What exactly is gamification, what is it not, and how will it be changing the way we do business in the next few years? Wharton's professor of legal studies and business ethics Kevin Werbach talks with Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball, a tech company that enables businesses to implement gamification, and Daniel Debow, co-founder of Rypple, a social performance management company.
To understand tsunamis or locate oil slicks, scientists are running ever more complex models in ever more powerful machines. Some are now able to compute nearly ten million billion operations per second. Welcome to the world of HPC (High Performance Calculation) where technical challenge meets major industrial stakes.
Whether in business schools, firms or in the specialized press, innovation is a highly praised value. What if it were a myth? The road to success could also lie in the art of imitation. The examples stand before us: Apple, EasyJet, and Wal-Mart are well-known innovative companies. And yet, their success was largely built on their ability to combine both innovation and imitation.
From risk profiling to gene therapy and molecular diagnostics, personalized medicine opens new, exciting fields to medical research. Not only is it good news for the patients: considerable improvements are at stake, both for health systems and pharmaceutical firms now struggling to reinvent themselves. But the road ahead is still full of obstacles.
The free software movement when viewed from afar remains poorly understood but on closer inspection reveals a web of surprises. Who knows that around half of all "volunteers" are actually being paid for their contributions? The frontier between commercial and non-commercial activity has become somewhat blurred and the idealized vision of a utopian community actually hides an extremely wide range of actors and entities.
The phenomenon of free has hit many businesses hard, particularly media businesses, argues Saul J. Berman, Global & Americas Leader for the IBM Strategy & Change Consulting Group. In 'Not for Free: Revenue Strategies for a New World', Berman offers lessons from successful business model innovations as well as from failures. Who pays for free content and why new models are essential for success?
It was a mere dream ten years ago, an emerging market only three years ago. Today, the e-book is on the verge of transforming drastically the publishing industry. The arrival of e-readers has sent the demand through the roof and by 2015, within developed nations, digital media could represent 20% of the book market in value. The radical transformation of the value chain puts publishers under heavy stress with the arrival of new players.
The spectacular boom in both production and consumption of unconventional gas in the United States is a success story that few would have predicted at the dawn of the new millennium. Large oil companies are fighting to make up for this missed opportunity. Through mergers and acquisitions they have made the sector a key component of corporate strategy. The stakes could not be higher and decisions made now will have huge consequences for the future balance of the global energy industry.
The U.S. Senate just passed a bill reforming the patent system, without appeasing controversies that for the past ten years have been agitating academic circles as well as the Silicon Valley. Patents are generally considered to fuel innovation. But do they?
The global economy is becoming increasingly interconnected, and innovative businesses are harnessing the power of this network.
Intel's breakthrough "vertical" chip means that computer capacity will keep increasing, at least for 10 to 20 years. What will all that new firepower mean for technology and society? And what happens after that?
Globalization has given rise to a new definition of competition and the capacity to innovate has become the new international standard for differentiation. France's elite engineering schools are now more than ever being measured for their performance against the world's most prestigious universities. The Institut Montaigne recently published a report entitled, "Adapting our engineers' education to globalization", in which the challenges of the new reality are made clear. First and foremost : "making innovation the motor of the engineering curriculum".
