Disruption in the Era of Advanced Analytics

Reasonable view,   should we be scanning companies to determine where this is likely?

Rasmus Wegener: Disruption in the Era of Advanced Analytics
Bain Partner Rasmus Wegener shares three patterns that can signal when an industry is ripe for disruption driven by advanced analytics.

By Rasmus Wegener

Companies that successfully harness the power of advanced analytics spur innovation and disruption in their industries, which in turn boosts their value relative to competitors. Rasmus Wegener, a partner with Bain’s Advanced Analytics practice, shares three patterns that can signal when an industry is ripe for disruption driven by advanced analytics.

Read the Bain Brief: Disruption in the Era of Advanced Analytics

Read the transcript below.  ... "

Advertising in the Age of Alexa

A former colleague writes. More at the link.

Advertising in the Age of Alexa or: How to Stop Worrying and Build Your Brand  By Lou Killeffer

Very glad to be returning as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

When the "Advertising Campaigns" course I taught last year (Chobani & Chapel Hill) became unavailable, Carolina asked me to create a new course of my own, and last week the Curriculum Committee approved it: MEJO 490.5 "Advertising in the Age of Alexa or: How to Stop Worrying and Build Your Brand". 

My aim is an exploration of established advertising and brand theory and their evolving best practices in response to decades of continuous digital disruption. Through selected readings, engaging discussion, student research, and live interface with some of today’s most enlightened, real-world practitioners, we'll investigate  .... "

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.... "

Potential AI Disruption in Industries

A good set of examples in industries.  Not very much detail, in fact speculation as to direct use in many cases.  Still useful to think about their implications.  Even if AI, in the sense of Machine Learning,  cannot address these cases, it shows a vulnerability that is still there for other technology.    Remember that digitization and analytics by itself can be disruptive.

A snapshot of AI disruption in 27 industries by Entefy

A report from McKinsey estimated that as much as $12 billion was invested globally in artificial intelligence technologies during 2016, including projects focused on machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and autonomous vehicles. That figure cuts across industries, and in real-world terms represents thousands of individual R&D projects. 

Unless you’re closely monitoring developments in artificial intelligence, you probably learn about new AI technologies one headline at a time. “New AI system beats champion Go player” or “Advanced AI improves doctors’ diagnoses.” That sort of thing. 

But you can get a much better sense of the scope and diversity of newly emerging AI technologies by learning about a lot of them at once. In this case, 27 different projects transforming 27 different industries. Which is what our research has produced, as you’ll see below.

News of a single AI technology can be pretty exciting, even inspiring. Understanding the diversity and vision of dozens of them underscores just how powerfully transformative this current generation of AI technologies already is, or will soon be.

Here’s our roundup of disruptive AI technologies being designed, built, or deployed in 27 different industries: .... "   (List of 27 industries follows) 

Rise of the Financial Robo Advisor

Much interested in the dynamics of how systems will dynamically and perceptively give advice.   In this blog have called them 'Assistants'.    How will they disrupt in giving financial advice?

The Rise of the Robo-advisor: How Fintech Is Disrupting Retirement  In Knowledge@Wharton

Artificial intelligence is changing the world of retirement planning. By using improved datasets and algorithms to efficiently deliver solutions tailored to people’s needs, AI can help them save, invest and retire better. One of the hottest trends to emerge in this area in recent years is the use of robo-advisors. These are software programs that use the data supplied by clients to create and automatically manage their investment portfolios. They’re gaining in popularity, but are they better than human advisors?

“Robo-advisors are a potential solution to the complexities of financial decision-making,” particularly in retirement planning, said Jill E. Fisch, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “But at the same time, there’s a lot we don’t know about robo-advisors — exactly how they work and how effective a solution they’re going to be.” She and other experts from Wharton and elsewhere spoke at a conference hosted by the Pension Research Council titled “The Disruptive Impact of FinTech on Retirement Systems.”   ... " 

Signals of Disruption

Have been involved in several meetings to determine and evaluate such signals. See below a bare outline from MIT/Sloan.  May sound simplistic but there is much more at the link to flesh it out.   This is more of a risk analysis checklist starting point to consider.  There are a number of good industry and specific examples at the link.

Three Signals Your Industry is About to Be Disrupted
By Megan Beck and Barry Libert in MIT/Sloan

Sign #1: Your Industry Has Significant Regulatory Burdens
Sign #2: Your Customers Have to Work at Managing Their Costs
Sign #3: Your Customers’ Experience Isn’t Positive — or Even Neutral  ... " 

Unilever and WPP Collaborate for Disruptive Tech

Unilever and WPP Launch Collaboration in Singapore

SINGAPORE – Unilever and WPP have established an in-house collaboration with Unilever Foundry and its start-up community.

The partnership, which involves a flexible new Team Unilever model along with specialist input from WPP, is designed to meet the FMCG giant’s marketing needs in a period of technological change and drive innovation. ...

Peter Dart, WPP’s global team leader for Unilever, added: “We wanted to co-create a structure that allows us to work more closely with Unilever and focus on all the various services along the consumer journey that can help Unilever and its brands grow. The key is agility and the enhancing ability to respond to disruption in the consumer products market as well as in marketing services offerings.” ... " 

Disruption is not the Measure

Sometimes all I hear is disruption, but it is not all there is, and itself is not a measure.  We made money for many years on improvement alone.  So look for disruption, but include hints to value along the way.  By Deloitte in the WSJ:

Disruption Is Not the Key to Winning
Companies can create competitive advantage by leveraging digital technologies to provide exceptional experiences for customers. Six enablers can help.

“Disruptor” is a term used frequently to describe successful modern companies. Airbnb is often credited with disrupting the lodging industry, Uber is cited as a disruptor of the transportation business, and Amazon is widely seen as disrupting retail. Yet while these companies have certainly transformed their industries through innovative business models, disruption isn’t the yardstick for measuring success.  ... " 

Working in a Digitally Disrupted World

In McKinsey:

Do American workers feel they can ‘make it’?
Whether people in the United States believe they can thrive economically in a digitally disrupted world depends strongly on the amount of education they’ve attained, according to a new survey. ... " 

Acquiring Digital Companies

Via Bain:

3 Ways M&A Is Different When You’re Acquiring a Digital Company  by Arnaud Leroi

Even for experienced deal makers, a first digital acquisition is bound to be an education. Companies acquire to accelerate their overall strategy and digital transformation, as Publicis Groupe did when it acquired Sapient for $3.7 billion in 2014 to help it make the leap from a traditional advertising company to a digital one. But when companies turn to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to help them deal with digital disruption, they usually discover not only how different a beast digital M&A is compared with traditional M&A, but also that everything they thought they knew about M&A may actually not help. They’re also likely to be paying an even higher premium for the acquisition, betting on a fast—although uncertain—development.

Few executives appear prepared for the challenges of digital M&A. When we recently interviewed top M&A executives in Europe about their experience, fully three-quarters of them said that digital disruption has had a relatively large impact or even requires a complete overhaul of their M&A strategy. However, only 11% described themselves as being either “mature” or “advanced” on the learning curve. .... " 

Wal-Mart right about AR being a Sure Thing?

In RetailWire. With an interesting, ongoing discussion.  Do we have ubiquity of AR coming? Replacing smartphones in five years?

Is Walmart’s innovation leader right that the AR revolution is a sure thing?   by Matthew Stern

Pokémon Go may have come and gone, but big names in the retail world are making serious investments in the future of augmented reality (AR) and believe that mass adoption of the technology is soon forthcoming. That was the main takeaway from a session last week at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago given by Imran Ansani, principal manager of innovation at Walmart Labs.

“Earlier this week Apple had their worldwide developer’s conference,” Mr. Ansani said. “The big revelation was not some new iPad or a Mac Book Pro or anything fancy like that. It was [an augmented reality developer’s kit] called the ARKit. That kind of gives you an understanding of how important augmented reality is to some of these bigger players, and what we can start expecting to see in the future.”

Despite the current lack of a “killer app” or point of critical mass, Mr. Ansani sees AR as reaching ubiquity in the next five years. In fact, he believes the smartphone will become obsolete in favor of AR-enabled devices that allow people to interact with computers in a “more natural” way.  ... " 

See recent article on ubiquity of AR. 

Little Ideas for Innovation

Like to see thoughts coming out of someone who is thinking about decisions and operations, rather than just magical neural-inspired mappings.

How ‘Little Ideas’ Can Lead to Powerful Innovations
When most people hear the word innovation, they think about Uber, Airbnb and Amazon — disruptive companies that upended entire industries with a radical new way to do business. But Wharton operations, information and decisions practice professor David Robertson argues that this view is too narrow a definition of innovation, and one that is not useful to most companies.

In his book, The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation, Robertson talks about a more practical way companies can innovate: by focusing on complementary actions around a key product. He teaches innovation and product development at Wharton and is the host of Innovation Navigation, a Wharton Business Radio program. Robertson recently spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about his book.  ... 

An edited transcript of the conversation follows. ...  "

Conflicting Demands and Creativity

In MIT/Sloan:

Conflicting demands within a business can be a source of creativity and opportunity — if they are handled well.
  
The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

But within a business, opposing ideas typically lead to conflict, and in the face of conflicting demands, managers will feel anxiety, stress, and frustration. However, our research at Aeon Co. Ltd., one of Japan’s largest retailers, suggests that a positive approach to handling conflicts between opposing ideas can create new value for a company.

Like many retailers, Aeon faces a built-in conflict in its operations. On the one hand, managers in local stores want to adapt their stock to meet local communities’ preferences and needs. On the other hand, the executive team at Aeon’s national headquarters in Chiba, Japan, strives for greater economies of scale. .... " 

Disruption Through Design

In UXMatters:

How IBM Is Embracing the Future Through Design

By Atul Handa and Kanupriya Vashisht  February 6, 2017   

IBM has chosen to create disruption through design. … We interviewed Karel Vredenburg, Director of IBM Design’s worldwide client program and head of IBM Studios in Canada, who told us, “We’ve put everything into this transformation.”

Shifting trends are forcing technology companies to reimagine their value proposition. IBM has chosen to create disruption through design. In embracing the future, the company is essentially invoking its past. Back in 1956, IBM was the first large company to establish a corporate-wide design program. But this time, the company’s goals are more ambitious.

..... we interviewed Karel Vredenburg, Director of IBM Design’s worldwide client program and head of IBM Studios in Canada, who told us,  ....  The company is investing more than $100 million in becoming design centered. .... " 

Disrupting Elevators

Recall we worked on simulating operations of elevators, acting as an interactions of people and machines.   Made me note this piece.  In the CACM:

Elevator Makers Think Outside the Box, and Even Sideways  By Reuters 
ThyssenKrupp's new $43 million elevator test tower soars 246 meters (808 ft) above the German town of Rottweil, but the company's lifts chief is not only thinking vertically. .... "

Disruptive Theory of Innovation

The “Jobs to be Done” Theory of Innovation

Clayton Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School, builds upon the theory of disruptive innovation for which he is well-known. He speaks about his new book examining how successful companies know how to grow. ... " 

Cognitive Disrupting Enterprises and the C-Suite

Why is clear, but how and the implications are still unclear.  What are the all the dimensions of disruption.  What will the clearest use cases be? Likely increasingly valuable and engaging assistants.

AI, Cognitive Computing To Disrupt Enterprises: IDC

IDC is forecasting big growth for cognitive computing and AI in the next 5 years. This infographic shows the growth, industries, and use-cases for these technologies.

What used to be science fiction is now an accepted path for IT. Multiple IT analyst firms are predicting that artificial intelligence technologies will become important components in future IT organizations. Indeed, at the Gartner Symposium, AI was simply another accepted factor in almost every system that will be created in the next decade   .... " 

The Disruption of Bots.

Been continuing a look at the practical use  of bots.  Here the history of chatbots, types of bots, and why they can be so disruptive.

Intel Acquires Nervana: How AI is Disrupting the Largest Industries

Unexpected, but have always been impressed with Intel's deep innovation, want to see hardware enhanced AI.

In Medium:   Standing on the Shore*: How AI is Disrupting the World’s largest Industries 

Artificial Intelligence is undergoing a massive acceleration driven by rapid growth in available data and rapid evolution of algorithms.

Intel’s acquisition this Tuesday of our portfolio company Nervana Systems validates that our companies’ platforms, driving this acceleration, are disrupting the world’s largest industries.

Our thesis is that a) increasingly powerful and inexpensive hardware that is machine learning/deep learning-friendly (lots of multipliers and fast memory; e.g., Nervana Systems), b) a flourishing of learning approaches running on that hardware, and c) large, novel data sets, now inexpensive to acquire and refresh, to train and drive those novel learning algorithms, is fueling a transformation of major global industries right in front of everyone’s eyes....  " 

Pivoting to Digital

A look mostly at large company examples.   In Knowledge @ Wharton: 

" ... How Industrial Firms Can Pivot to Digital Business Models In the fourth article of the series, “The Network Revolution: Creating Value through Platforms, People and Technology,” authors Barry Libert, Megan Beck and Jerry (Yoram) Wind look at how industrial companies can learn how to think like a digital disruptor and reorient their business models accordingly. Libert is CEO of OpenMatters and Beck is the chief insights officer. Wind is a Wharton marketing professor and director of Wharton’s SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. They also wrote a book called The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models. ... "