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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Many organizations use large data and data analytics as an essential asset in their business. Think about how Waze collects and analyzes millions of queries every day to estimate traffic flows or airlines organize the requests for seats for hundreds of thousands of users each day to reset their pricing, or UPS uses hundreds of thousands of sensors to track millions of packages each data to feed users information about the progress of their shipments.
For this assignment, please choose a company that uses large data or data analytics to enhance its business. In other words, big data can be valuable in the context of offering a service or as a complement to another business process. How does data serve as an asset in their business? What type of investment are required to build and renew that asset? What type of investments and process put that asset to use, and creates value for the company? How does the company capture value from large data and analytics? What challenges did the company have to overcome to make use of the assets? What challenges and opportunities do you anticipate for the company in the future? Devote most of the space to value creation, but feel free to make 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.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art aka “the Met” in New York City is the third most visited museum in the world. Established in 1870, the Met has accumulated a collection of over 2 million artifacts housed in 2.2 million square [...]
Combining data analytics and healthcare raises interesting questions of ethics. In a context where consumer data are an increasingly valuable currency globally and concerns for individual privacy becomes widespread, what is 23andMe’s situation?
While most cases at HBS treat Burger King as McDonald's eternal rival, there's a new reason why the competition has increased in the 21st century. By turning details about customer transactions, preferences, and purchasing patterns into actionable insights, Burger King [...]
Agriculture is among businesses that can benefit from big data the most. In theory. The leader in building infrastructure is a controversial but consistent company
Farm equipment manufacturer? Data technology leader? How about both? As the global leader in precision agriculture, John Deere is innovating through the internet of things and data analytics to help farmers improve their operations, bottom line, and ability to feed [...]
Brex is a corporate card company that uses bank information to make real-time data-driven decisions about the credit limits that it should set for start-ups and other small businesses. This helps minimize financial risk while increasing the revenue that the [...]
Wayfair is an e-commerce company that specialized in furniture and home-goods. Founded in 2002, it is one of the largest e-commerce companies in the United States with $8 billion of sales in 2018. The company has experienced high growth, and [...]
Rachio is a company that sells smart irrigation system controllers and creatively combines data from different sources to provide integrated services for its customers.
"While carpooling isn't new, Waze Carpool is a fresh way to share the road and the cost of commuting. A cost-effective alternative to rideshare services, Carpool lets you choose to drive or ride with people already going your way. Use [...]
Breaking down how the near $16 billion acquisition of the data analytics company adds value to Salesforce and its customer through examples and visualizations
'Self-driving cars' may well be a misnomer, because data drives them. 🚗🚗🚗 As the pioneer in self-driving technology, how does data set Waymo apart? Can their data capabilities allow them to tip the self-driving market?
DreamBox Learning is an intelligent, adaptive learning platform that sources data points to adjust instruction instantly and provide reports for teachers, parents, and administrators. Will this technology replace teachers or will it be adopted as a compliment or a tool [...]
Kanga is an early stage New York-based company creating the ultimate destination for gaming fans. The company’s consumer products help fans discover content through aggregation and real-time metadata and drive user engagement through gamification.
Shell, the international energy company, has been an early adopter of data analytics in order to identify potential for improvement in the evolving energy industry. The company constantly tries to innovate, and it does not hold back from investing heavily [...]
By using new data sources and employing up-to-date machine learning technology, online loan provider Kreditech hopes to better understand applicant’s financial situation and personality.
At 41,515/sq km, the Philippine's capital of Manila is the most densely populated city in the world [1]. In a country of 145 cities, 1,489 municipalities ('barangays'), across more than 7,000 islands, to say that the logistics challenge is an [...]
ABOUT ESRI Growing out of research conducted at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics, Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri from here on) was founded as a land-use consulting firm in 1969 with a mere $1,100 of seed capital from founders [...]
Cargill, a world-leading agriculture conglomerate, has empowered dairy farmers with its big data solutions to make cows happier, healthier and more productive.
The tradeoff between one’s privacy and an enhanced user experience is often considered within the context of such large corporations but there are much smaller companies that also rely on big data to enhance and monetize their business. One such [...]
Airbus launched its Skywise system to allow its airline customers to collect and better analyze their aircraft data with the goal of improving operations and reducing costs.
