AI at the Edge

 UK and elsewhere, attempts at merging advanced tech efforts.

Towards Broad Artificial Intelligence (AI) & The Edge in 2021  by 7wData

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickened its progress in 2021. 

A new administration is in place in the US and the talk is about a major push for Green Technology and the need to stimulate next generation infrastructure including AI and 5G to generate economic recovery with David Knight forecasting that 5G has the potential - the potential - to drive GDP growth of 40% or more by 2030. The Biden administration has stated that it will boost spending in emerging technologies that includes AI and 5G to $300Bn over a four year period.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the EU have announced a Green Deal and also need to consider the European AI policy to develop next generation companies that will drive economic growth and employment. It may well be that the EU and US (alongside Canada and other allies) will seek ways to work together on issues such as 5G policy and infrastructure development. The UK will be hosting COP 26 and has also made noises about AI and 5G development.

The world needs to find a way to successfully end the Covid-19 pandemic and in the post pandemic world move into a phase of economic growth with job creation. An opportunity exists for a new era of highly skilled jobs with sustainable economic development built around next generation technologies.  ... '

CPG in Pandemic Growth and Challenges

And piece related to previous item regards growth and inventory post Pandemic.

For giant food companies, the pandemic has fueled growth — and challenges

Theresa F. Lindeman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The past six months have been both a bonanza and a trial for the giant food companies that make products like cereal, canned soup, and macaroni and cheese. 

Pre-pandemic, there had been talk of their growing irrelevance, despite iconic brands and supply chains built up over decades. But there was a sudden shift as COVID-19’s spread kept people housebound and sent sales of many products spiking for companies like Kraft Heinz, which is dually based in Pittsburgh and Chicago, as well as General Mills, Mondelez and Campbell Soup Co. 

They’d all be happy to see the sales growth continue after there’s a vaccine on the scene.

“While the uptick in buying is partly driven by the pandemic, we are intentionally fueling this trend with sizable communication investments and media choices, and we’ll continue to leverage our momentum,” vowed Carlos Abrams-Rivera, the U.S. zone president for Kraft Heinz, during an investors’ day presentation last week.

At times in recent months, the heavy demand has strained the industry’s factories and supply chains, but the sudden intensity also sped up changes that the industry had been working on. Andrew Lazar, an analyst leading chats with food executives at a Barclays investors conference in early September, noted the 2020 crisis has been described as “essentially the greatest [consumer packaged goods] trial experiment of our lifetime.”

Consider the shift to shopping online for groceries, which avoids the risks of picking up the virus in crowded grocery stores.  .... " 

Forestry System for Growth Prediction

Another example of my previous work in forestry.    Would have been useful to manage harvesting schedules.

Researcher to Receive Top Global Forestry Award From Swedish King

Oregon State University News
by Steve Ludeberg

Oregon State University professor emeritus Richard Waring will share this year's Marcus Wallenberg Prize, to be presented by Swedish King Carl Gustav XVI, for his role in developing a computer model to predict forest growth amid climate change. Waring and Australian colleagues and co-honorees Joe Landsberg and Nicholas Coops designed the Physiological Principles Predicting Growth model, which incorporates satellite imagery to show how different environmental conditions impact the world's forests. Said Waring, "By the late 1990s, enough was published that we thought a simplified model could be built that could help foresters as well as ecologists predict how stands of a composition of tree species might respond to changing environments." Waring and Landsberg first presented the model in 1997, and Coops' addition of satellite imagery in 1998 enabled large forest areas to be surveyed, and forest growth and carbon storage to be predicted on a larger scale. ... " 

Re Predictions of IOT Growth

In part depends on how you define it.  Smart Home IOT has exploded, but security has added an element of caution.

Why the Internet of Things isn’t growing as rapidly as predicted from Verdict.co

Early forecasts for the IoT suggested that there would be 50 billion global devices connected by 2020, but in reality we have only reached about 2 billion. Let’s look at why the Internet of Things isn’t growing as rapidly as predicted.

In 2010, we started to see huge excitement about the IoT from a diverse ecosystem of suppliers, ranging from operators and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to infrastructure vendors, module manufacturers, integrators, and solution providers. Early forecasts from companies such as Cisco and Ericsson suggested that by 2020 we would see from 20-50 billion devices connected.

What went wrong?
Initial suggestions were based on the assumption that once we had ubiquitous global connectivity, everything that could be connected would be connected. In the consumer market, projections were based on a huge rise in the number of connected cars (which we did in fact see), as well as in segments such as consumer electronics, wearables, smart watches, smart cities, and health monitoring devices. In the business segment, utilities, insurance, retail, industrial fleets, and manufacturing were (and still are) the primary verticals assumed to significantly benefit from IoT connectivity. The opportunity for IoT was also supposed to be global – not only from local/regional deployments across the world, but also from inter-country deployments where connections required roaming agreements and single-SKU global SIMs.  .... " 

Growth Modeling

Good piece by Vincent Granville on growth modeling in DSC.  Non technical.  Intro below with details at the link.

Growth Modeling for Business Managers and Executives
Posted by Vincent Granville  in DSC

You don't need a sophisticated model nor advanced machine learning techniques to quickly get a high level picture and trends for bottom-line business metrics. Not only the concepts explained here are easy to grasp, but while being high level, it nevertheless includes granular effects. The methodology presented here was used in business contexts in the past, when I was working with enterprise executives, particularly finance people, to assess the overall health of their business, and the short and long term impacts of new initiatives to boost growth. .

The model is available as an Excel spreadsheet, driven by four main parameters, as illustrated below. The growth can be in revenue, users, or any other fundamental metric. Time periods are measured in days when assessing the impact of an advertising campaign, or in months when assessing revenue growth caused by a new initiative. It typically involves the following dynamic:

New growth occurs at each time period, for instance new users.

It accumulates over time: new users become regular users, some of them eventually disappear -- this can be factored in in the growth curve.

There is usually a time lag between an action and a reaction:  the effect of TV advertising campaigns may peak after a while (not immediately) and eventually decay.   .... "

Cracking the Brand Growth Code

Subconscious brand preference, more than a millennial obsession with direct delivery.  Gillette take note.

Podcast and Transcript from Knowledge@Wharton

MARKETING

Cracking the Code on Brand Growth

The battle for business growth does not take place on the internet or on store shelves. Rather, it takes place in the subconscious mind of prospective customers, whose purchasing decisions are more malleable than many brand leaders realize, write Michael Platt and Leslie Zane in this opinion piece. Zane is the founder of Triggers, a growth strategy company that has helped Fortune 500 firms with brand-building initiatives for 24 years. Platt is a professor of marketing, psychology and neuroscience at Wharton. He leads the school’s Neuroscience Initiative.

When Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin launched his now famous YouTube video in 2012, no one imagined that it would cause earth-shaking tremors under razor behemoth Gillette. But it did. The tongue-in-cheek style video explaining the Club’s many virtues had a seismic effect. The day it was released, the brand’s website crashed from huge traffic. Within 48 hours, 12,000 orders were received. A few years later, Unilever bought the Club for $1 billion.

Most analyses of the Dollar Shave Club’s success conclude that it accomplished this feat because of millennials’ obsession with direct delivery, the founder’s comedic flair, or its bargain basement prices. We say it was something much deeper. In fact, Dollar Shave Club rose to prominence because it employed the formula we have discovered to be the key to changing subconscious brand preference: the expansion of a brand’s positive associations in customers’ memories to the point that it becomes an automatic, involuntary choice.

While some marketers have called this startup’s success an anomaly, we have found that the opposite is true. Every brand, whether a startup or an established household name, has untapped growth potential and the ability to become the automatic choice of more consumers.  ... " 

Consumer Goods Companies Driving Growth

It was clear for decades, prediction of product growth was the key. In McKinsey, a considerable piece:

"  ... From lab to leader: How consumer companies can drive growth at scale with disruptive innovation

In the era of “fast products” and digital disruption, delivering growth requires putting in place new predictive consumer-growth capabilities, including innovation, based on speed, agility, and scale.... "

Sales Growth with Analytics

Some reasonable thoughts from McKinsey.  Get the data right.

Starting the analytics journey: Where you can find sales growth right now

By Charles Atkins, Mitra Mahdavian, Katelyn McCarthy, and Michael Viertler

By getting five basic elements right, sales teams can drive new revenue while building analytics muscles for the future.

If data is the oil of the digital age, then analytics is the engine that turns it into energy. What excites the most forward-thinking executives today is analytics’ strategic value: the ability to enable and inform broad commercial growth and transformation, not just incremental efficiency gains. ... "

Roots of Inorganic Growth

Interesting stats, in particular how this can be driven by analytics.

The roots of organic growth      By Kabir Ahuja, Liz Hilton Segel, and Jesko Perrey

There are many paths to growth, and high performers take more than one—supported by reinforcing capabilities such as advanced analytics and digital customer-experience management.

Growth is a tonic for most companies. It attracts talent and creates strategic options while generating financial resources to fund new moves—provided the growth is profitable. It’s also been harder to come by over the past decade, as a sluggish macroeconomic environment and accelerating, technology-driven disruption have ratcheted up pressure on businesses. ....

The potential of advanced analytics

Across all the growth lenses, we found significant potential for an upside in advanced analytics. As Exhibit 2 shows, even at today’s low levels of penetration, advanced-analytics capabilities were strongly associated with the highest levels of growth, suggesting they will be a critical platform for the next generation of performance. ....  " 

Go for Growth

In the HBR:

Stop Focusing on Profitability and Go for Growth
by Michael Mankins

" .... Today’s era of superabundant capital rewards faster growth. To thrive in this new world, leaders must overcome the obstacles to growth in their organizations. They must reward the creativity and ingenuity required to devise new growth options. They must avoid screening out too many growth ideas, and opt instead to invest in a portfolio of growth experiments (or options). And, finally, they must build the skills and capabilities required to capitalize on their most promising experiments. This requires treating the time, talent, and energy of a company’s workforce as the truly scarce resources that they are and managing them with the same care and rigor that has been brought to financial capital in years past. .... " 

How Retailers can Cope with Slowing Growth

In  Knowledge@Wharton,  Non -Technical, but quite strategic these days.  Recall talking to Marshall Fisher while in the enterprise.   (See his book)

How Retailers can Cope with Slowing Growth

Wharton's Marshall Fisher discusses why retailers must break their 'addiction' to top-line growth.

Podcast:

"... Successful retailers can grow quickly in their early years simply by opening new stores. But eventually they run out of real estate, and then they need the discipline to stop opening new stores and focus instead on driving more sales through their existing stores. They can boost sales and profits dramatically by making changes in the way they run their existing stores, such as with help from analytics and the use of technology.

In fact, several such small changes brought in profits that helped 17 retailers outperform the stock performance of the S&P 500 index, according to a new study titled “Curing the Addiction to Growth” published in the Harvard Business Review by Marshall Fisher, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, along with his co-authors, Vishal Gaur (who has a PhD from the Wharton School and now is a professor at Cornell’s Johnson School) and Herb Kleinberger (who has an MBA from Wharton and for many years led PWC’s retail practice).    .... " 

Barriers to Growth

In the HBR:   Intriguing views by executives.  " ... It’s a common story in business today. Eighty-five percent of executives say that the greatest barriers to achieving their growth objectives lie inside their own four walls, according to research by Bain & Company. In the largest companies, this rises to 94 percent of executives who believe that their most difficult challenges are internal, not external. ...  "

On the State of Human Capital

From Growthology  Kauffman Foundation.

" ... This post is the first in a series by the Growthology team, where we will take a look at some of the topics discussed in State of the Field, a compilation of knowledge on entrepreneurship research written by the leading experts in the field. .... 

Brink Lindsey, author of the book Human Capitalism, writes that “the central importance of human capital in today’s economy is a response to the rise of social complexity.” As society has become increasingly complex, jobs have become more highly skilled, the workforce has changed, and the study of human capital has become increasingly mainstream.

While financial means are important for a startup’s success, I argue that human capital is equally important. Human capital within entrepreneurship is one area Growthology will expand on throughout the course of this year. Several of my colleagues’ posts have presented different points of view on human capital matters (workers, students and crowdfunding to name only the most recent). ... " 

Automation Driving Retail Growth

Statistics on retail growth.  Advanced automation replacing in store and back end knowledge workers too.   Relates to think tank examination we did this week.  Voice commands.

" .... E-commerce platform provider Demandware has released its annual list of retail predictions for 2016, and many of them center on how machines will continue taking over tasks once done by people.

Out of the nine trends Demandware identifies, four are related to growing IT automation: machine learning driving voice-based intelligence assistants, in-store payment evolving dramatically, data-driven decision marketing replacing gut instinct, and last-mile fulfillment providers driving instant gratification.

Specifically, Demandware predicts that machine learning will expand beyond shopper personalization to provide retailers with a Siri-like intelligence assistant that pops up occasionally with insights and recommendations. Swiping, typing and tapping be largely replaced by voice commands. This will help make personalization such a fundamental part of the shopping experience that consumers will no longer notice it. ... " 

Leading Thinkers on Growth and Prosperty

In McKinsey:

"Leading thinkers on how to maintain economic growth and prosperity .... What is the single biggest opportunity we can act on now to sustain rising prosperity for the long term? ... "