Insights

What does it take to capture the devotion of a fickle fan base in a fiercely competitive industry? How can you capitalize on the viral popularity of a game within the ‘freemium’ model? How should a company strategically scale following one massive blockbuster hit? Professor Jeffrey Rayport looks to Candy Crush for the answers to these questions in this Cold Call podcast.

When then relative HBS newcomer Professor Bill Sahlman introduced the idea of an Entrepreneurial Finance course, he received little to no encouragement. Fast forward 30 years, and not only was Sahlman’s course hugely successful and popular among the students, but he succeeded in developing an entirely new framework to think about finance in entrepreneurial ventures that still rings true today.

In the digital landscape, the rules of strategy are changing. In this flash talk, Professor Sunil Gupta shares how to focus on the possibilities of technology – without missing the big picture.

The Internet is anything but boring; as a place it has become edgy, often rude, and infinitely fascinating. Businesses who aim to succeed in the digital economy need to understand this. Here, Professor John Deighton offers a primer on how to play — or else be played — in the Internet era.

With the rise of AI-driven personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, chatbots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and the market value of chatbots is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025. What are the causes and implications of this chatbot boom, and what will it mean for the future of business? Carrie Epstein and Amy Sinensky of Viacom explore the question in this flash talk from Future Assembly 2018.

How can businesses navigate this AI-driven future that we’re all moving towards? In this keynote from our 2018 Digital Transformation Summit, Amy Yu recommends companies focus on three things: data, talent and ethics.

Big data…artificial intelligence…Internet of Things. These technologies have taken their shares of the headlines the past few years, but now machine learning is the buzz. Mike Teodorescu explains how it is changing the lives of consumers and businesses.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being deployed in content-related operations such as translation and transcription. Capturing value will depend on four key factors.

Toutiao, the media giant and new aggregator platform, has created a strong competitive advantage by leveraging machine learning to provide customized content to its readers, but that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t still rely on top talent to get the job done.

The potential of AI to change the world is undeniable, and yet there is an ugly side to this transformational technology in the form of biased and exclusionary machine learning. Amar Ashar and Sandra Cortesi of the Berkman Klein Center’s Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence group detail some of the most pressing issues related to the AI divide and explore how AI can become more inclusive as the technology takes greater hold globally.