HBS Digital Initiative builds community and expertise around digital transformation and tech at Harvard Business School and beyond. We manage this forum to gather and share perspectives from the HBS student community.
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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 have elected to use this platform for assignments. The goal of using Open Knowledge is to stimulate deeper conversation, cross-pollination between ideas, and inclusion of the global "digital transformation" community.
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Please pick one company that deploys machine learning or other aspects of deep learning. Amazon uses AI to anticipate when an ad has value that others will bid. 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 use of AI as a service, or you may focus on the use of AI within the 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 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.
IntelligentX was developed to create a unique product proposition: a beer brewed by artificial intelligence (AI) that followed the tastes of its customers.
Pymetrics leverages decades of neuroscience research and machine learning to match quality job candidates with the right companies and careers. It does this through a gamified process that provides companies with data on behavioral traits of candidates applying for the [...]
Upstart's mission is to democratize the market of personal loans by using the power of AI technology to simplify customer acquisition processes and automate approvals. However, how far can this technology go to benefit customers and capture the value of [...]
Symrise AG, a leading German producer of fragrances and flavors, uses an artificial intelligence (AI) software developed with IBM to create new fragrances more efficiently.
BrainCo has developed and launched an AI-powered headband that can track users’ level of focus and engagement. Market reactions have been mixed with compliments and controversies. Will this mind reader succeed?
Sky Limited, the British media and telecommunications conglomerate owned by Comcast and headquartered in London, is working on the future of television. Ironically, the future of television has less and less to do with television itself, at least in the [...]
'Ken' means 'seeing'; 'sho' means 'nature' or 'essence'. 👀🌴 True to its name, Kensho employs AI to see the true nature of data. Kensho has disrupted the financial sector and has made its way into all of the major institutions. [...]
“It’s easy to build an app. It’s hard to test it.” – Liu, co-founder of test.ai[1] With 70,000+ apps already tested, Test.ai is on a mission to “improve the quality of software apps by making app development easier through the [...]
When asked what comes to mind when thinking about John Deere, the largest and one of the most popular agricultural, forestry and construction machinery manufacturer in the world, majority of people would not think "Artificial Intelligence." Yet, faced with the [...]
Rct studio is creating a fully immersive, AI-driven movie experience that adapts to the player's reactions, with each story creating thousands of permutations. Is this the prelude to a world of AI-driven characters that continuously evolve? Will such characters force [...]
It may sound like a Black Mirror episode yet it’s real: founded in 2016, AIMM is the first fully conversational AI based app that will help you find love!
