Since her departure from JP Morgan Chase to become CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, Blythe Masters, the renowned economist and market operator, initiated a speaking tour dedicated to blockchains. During the Exponential Finance Conference held on June 2nd 2015, she declared that “financial blockchain applications will be measured in the trillions.” Since this sensational announcement, specialized firms have been receiving many calls that all revolve around the same issue: “How will the blockchain technology help us take the ascendancy in our industry?” Today, there is a real curiosity, but above all, a need for education on the subject of Bitcoin and Ethereum protocols, as well as “blockchain technology.”
Legal and regulatory aspects are rarely mentioned when discussing innovation management. But they do play a major role, and the analysis of the legal environment is a crucial issue. It allows smart organizations to implement original strategies… even though there are a number of pitfalls.
Henceforth, many companies are afraid of getting uberized. Now, this danger, which has its roots in the emergence of the web twenty years ago, can be considered neither as a novelty nor a surprise. So why is the corporate world so unprepared? A simple matter of denial or an overly superficial understanding of digital technology? In any case, it has never been so urgent for the corporate world to understand what is going on. Be it only prepare the counter-attack.
One year after the IPO, Alibaba's new investments have started to impact the structure of the company. The group has adopted a modern and innovative way to exploit the funds it raised, shifting from defining itself as an e-commerce platform into what the group now calls an infrastructure for e-commerce.
Though BlackBerry has less than 1% of the smartphone market share today, it once had more than 50%. The question is how such a successful company could fall so far. Journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff provide many of the answers in their book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed recently had an opportunity to talk with McNish about what we can learn from the rise and fall of BlackBerry.
What are the triggers of an innovation project? Though there is extensive literature on innovation management, what exactly drives innovation remains unclear. And yet, it is a fundamental issue, considering that the future of the firm is at stake. Who should imagine this future and take the responsibility of initiating projects? R&D, marketing, prospective teams? There is no single answer. But a full range of business cases illustrate all three models.
"Although today's digital manufacturing machines are still in their infancy, they can already be used to make (almost) anything, anywhere. That changes everything," said Neil Gershenfeld, Director at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. Autonomous robotics, 3D printing, cloud computing, Internet of Things and sensor technologies are driving a paradigm shift in manufacturing. The new era of industrial production builds on the concept of cyber-physical systems. Consumers are expected to play an ever greater role in this new model.
Open community and collective intelligence have become significant phenomena in all fields where organizations and institutions used to play a leading role. In the business field, where socialstructing has manifested its power the most, we‘ve witnessed the emergence and evolution of Linux, Android, and now the open-source hardware driven by the grand IoT revolution. As an open-source electronic prototyping platform and kit board provider, Arduino has from the very beginning tied itself closely with an expansive user community and developer ecosystem, and has been widely accepted as the global leader in this area.
With the Model S, Tesla offers not only “the best car in the world,” but also an object from the Silicon Valley, closer in its architecture to a mobile electronic device than to a car, in the conventional sense. The electronics and system architecture but also the streamlined user experience: everything is designed in a framework where models are smartphones and tablets. The result is a car that draws its attractiveness from its own features, including its mechanical performance, and from the enchanting experience it promises, more than from simply rational, technical and economic features. Electronics and automotive technology, the best of both worlds, and beyond! This performance owes much to the personality of Elon Musk and to the culture of the company, which shares both the qualities and defects of a start-up. Will this culture survive to a change of scale?
Automakers are facing four changes that will altogether change the automotive experience in the few years to come. These four innovations, brought from the consumer electronics industry, include Connectivity, Artificial intelligence, Sensors, and Interface. Each of these four disrupting factors, taken independently, is a powerful wave on its own. When combined, they will redefine the industry.
Articles analyzing why there's no Chinese innovation are all over the place. Meanwhile, the situation is changing at a rapid pace. How do Chinese entrepreneurs move from imitators to innovators? To better understand these issues, our Chinese edition invited a number of pioneers and observers at the front-line of domestic and international innovations.
Digital media is evolving rapidly and requires more than traditional marketing. Suzie Reider, Google's managing director for brand solutions, and Gopi Kallayil, Google's chief evangelist for brand solutions, highlight six common traps that new-age marketers must avoid.
In February Elon Musk boldly predicted Tesla motors would go where no car company has ever gone before, to a $700 billion market valuation by 2025. To put that in perspective, Apple became the most valuable company in history when it reached a $700 billion market valuation in November 2014. Compared to the automobile industry, $700 billion dwarfs the market value of the five biggest public automobile companies. Together, Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford and Honda have a market cap of just $522 billion. Is Elon Musk crazy? Or is he planning something only he can see?
The more pervasive the threat, the higher the economic implications: no wonder cybersecurity has come under the spotlight in recent months. What, exactly, is at stake? And should the C-suite take hold?
New digital upstarts are threatening the bottom lines, growth prospects, and even business models of traditional service providers. It’s time for incumbents to innovate... or be left behind.
Business models that emerge today outline a world of hyper-competition: in the digital economy, it's always possible to find both better and cheaper elsewhere. Now, this tendency is spreading beyond the borders of the Net. How can a company survive in this ruthless world? How can it possibly stand out from others? New trends are emerging, new value proposals that could become the cornerstone of tomorrow's economy.
Yes, it is possible to rationalize the innovation effort, moving on from managing equilibrium to handling a constant imbalance. No, this is no easy matter. It requires that we revise - and fairly extensively - our natural reflexes and current tools, without slipping into fashionable fads. The good news is that research in management has now identified the principles needed to manage innovation. Here are eight of these principles.
In China just like everywhere else, the tertiary sector has long been deemed as an affiliation or an attachment to primary and secondary industries with a certain amount of contribution to employment, but never as a driver of the economy. The game is changing. Industries such as finance and retail are facing a technological reinvention, and great changes are also reshaping HR services.
Uber and Airbnb have undergone regulatory setbacks lately. But as regulators continue to crack the whip, there is little sign they will be able to stem the tide of popularity for these sharing services. Should the very idea of regulation evolve? It should not, at least, exist to protect entrenched industries and shut out competition. But companies like Uber, who have very strong Libertarian streaks, may have to make a move too. Will both sides learn to play together?
Compared to the evolution of the Maker Movement in Western countries, China has already formed a much larger bottom-up ecosystem, manifesting the ultimate goal of the Maker Movement - democratizing innovation. We call it the New Shanzhai, after the Chinese word for copycat. The question is, what will happen when these two worlds meet together?
