Firms today are establishing market leadership by mastering digital innovation. For example, the traditional "Mad Men" advertising agencies now have to be able to blend digital products and services with creative strategy. Amazon is as much a retailer and supply chain powerhouse as it is a digital innovator. Similarly, the Netflix business model is heavily reliant on continuously building and enhancing digital products and services to compete against incumbents in the entertainment industry. Ford is realizing that its future competitors are likely to be Facebook and Google and not BMW and Toyota. Meanwhile, Local Motors, an HBS-alum led startup, is using crowdsourcing, digital fabrication, and 3D printing to disrupt the automotive industry.

Digital Innovation and Transformation is a Harvard Business School course designed to equip students to confidently help conceive, lead, and execute digital innovation initiatives. To enrich the course experience, Professor Greenstein has elected to use this platform for assignments. The goal of using Platform is to stimulate deeper conversation, cross-pollination between ideas, and inclusion of the global "digital transformation" community.

We invite you to read more and dive in by adding your own thoughts through contributions and comments.

Latest Assignment

Machine Learning

April 21, 2021

Read The Full Prompt

Please pick one company that deploys machine learning or other aspects of deep learning. Amazon uses AI to anticipate when an ad has value. Google uses natural language processing to automate Translate. For this assignment, please choose a company that uses AI in a creative way to drive value creation, value capture, or its operating model.

You may focus on the use of AI as a service, or you may focus on the use of AI as an enhancement of a process of some part of its business. In other words, please describe how the organization deploys AI as a free-standing service around which it develops a business, or as a complement and improvement into its process.

Describe the current challenges and opportunities the company faces in this deployment. Then assess the recommend changes the company needs to make to address these challenges or take advantage of these opportunities. In your post, please consider any organizational changes the company needs to make to achieve its aspirations. While you should devote most of the space to value creation, please make some observations about aspects of the value capture strategy.

(Once again, to make it interesting, please stay away from big data use by the big five – Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.)

Create an approximately 800-word post by Wednesday, April 21, at 6 p.m. Please also respond to and comment on three other posts by April 22, 8 a.m. Feel free to use graphics, data, videos, and links to other sites to corroborate your points.

Selected posts will be discussed in class and also featured on the HBS Digital Initiative website.

Please prepare a 2-3 min summary of your blog post before class.

Submitted (32)

Stylumia: Bringing Science to the Art of Fashion
Surabhi
Last modified on April 19, 2021 at 9:48 pm
Stylumia is a SAAS company headquartered in Bangalore, India. It provides artificial intelligence-driven fashion analytics tools to apparel companies. It offers three AI-based solutions for trend forecasting, demand prediction, and design generation. Since its founding in 2015, the company has expanded globally, [...]
Tempus AI: Data-Driven Precision Medicine
Marcos
Last modified on April 20, 2021 at 11:30 am
Tempus uses AI to help doctors and institutions to fight cancer and other diseases. The company has built the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data and is now valued at more than $8 billion dollars.
Knewton Personalizes Learning with the Power of AI
MMD
Last modified on April 19, 2021 at 2:06 pm
Knewton uses AI to tailor educational content to the needs of individual students, allowing for a more personalized learning experience that helps students achieve mastery of learning outcomes.
Blue River Technology: The Field of Machine Learning
Julia Mullendore
Posted on April 19, 2021 at 11:12 am
Blue River Technology is bringing machine learning to the field. Their "See & Spray" technology is able to distinguish between wanted crops and unwanted pests to apply only pesticide where it is needed most, saving farmers money, improving yields, and [...]
Big Beer Uses Big data
Kyle Larkin
Posted on April 21, 2021 at 11:24 pm
The beer business is one that has always had a certain amount of “feel” to it. From the selection of the best hops to the art of brewing and forming a recipe to the right brands and packages to put [...]
Spacemaker: Merging AI technology with Urban Planning and Design
Kyle R
Posted on April 21, 2021 at 4:34 pm
Spacemaker is a cloud-based AI platform that augments the ability of urban designers, architects, and developers to design and build well-planned cities. As part of the company’s operating model, machine learning is used to bring generative design to reality. The [...]
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