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".
In an economic climate of constant transformation at ever increasing speed, the classical model of innovation, incremental by design, no longer ensures survival against the menace of obsolescence. As new competitors arrive on the market and constantly raise the stakes in terms of quality the continued existence of an enterprise rests on its ability to create ruptures with the past and move forward in a constant state of revolutionary innovation.
The world is on the brink of yet another technological revolution: "the Internet of Things". Just as the networking of computers led to multiple changes in our lives, the growing networking of things - connecting cars, power grids, even toilets to the Internet - may lead to other profound adjustments. Many forecasters say these changes will make us healthier, wealthier, and safer. But as with any new technology, there are also risks.
Green Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is no longer a distant dream. GreenTouch, a global consortium organized by Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, is spearheading an initiative to innovate and create technologies that will allow networks to achieve an increase in energy efficiency by a factor of 1000. The hope is that the energy required to power today's communications networks, the internet included, for one day will eventually be enough to last... three years.
More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.
The furor over the WikiLeaks affair graced headlines of newspapers across the globe and illuminated the nebulous world of hackers and internet pirates. Questions have been raised over the unseen threads that connect actors on both sides of the law. What links do they have with states and large corporations? Are they completely outside the capitalist system? Piracy has a storied history with lessons for the current situation that Rodolphe Durand, Professor of strategy at HEC and co-author of L'Organisation pirate (Le bord de l'eau, 2010), recently discussed.
Efforts to forecast our future fall short of a perfect dream where events can be weighed and measured with the predictability more commonly found in cookbooks the world over. If predictions could be made with the same degree of certainty that a baker employs then where would we find the creative drive to innovate ? In an increasingly uncertain world is it even possible for random acts of genius ? Can we embrace chaos and harness its power ? The paradox is that to plan for the future we must discard the limits of our present. When we accept this seeming contradiction the need for a stable hand is clear if we are to successfully identify the sea that acts as the ultimate source of attraction.
