Digital Innovation and Transformation

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.

Machine Learning

April 18, 2022

Read The Full Prompt

Many companies deploy 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 innovate in its operating model.

You may focus on use of AI as a service, or you may focus on the use of AI as an enhancement of some part of a service or 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 of its business process.

Describe the current challenges and opportunities the company faces in this deployment. Then assess the changes the company needs to make to address these challenges or take advantages 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.)

1000 words max.

Assignment

Create an approximately 1000 word post to make your contribution by April 18, at 6 p.m.

Please use graphics, data, videos, and links to other sites to corroborate your points. These additional links do not count against your word limit.

Please also comment on three other posts. Comments are due by April 19 at 9 a.m.

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