Insights

As companies adopt artificial intelligence to increase efficiency, are their employees skilled enough to use those technologies effectively? Professor Prithwiraj Choudhury looks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a case study.

You see disruption on the horizon, you recognize a big market, you know the change is coming, you know technology is going drive it, you know the value and business models are about to fundamentally change – now what? GE’s Bill Ruh highlights how industrial firms can be proactive and take digital transformation in to their own hands – before they are disrupted themselves.

To be a successful omnichannel retailer in the age of e-commerce, Target can no longer simply continue to incrementally improve each individual aspect of its business. Instead, the company needs a unique and systemwide digital supply strategy that will strengthen Target’s customer promise as well as its bottom line.

As customer demand for greater computing power and product customizations grows, Intel must ask itself, “What is the future the computing supply chain?” and find a way to stay relevant as microprocessors gain further dominance.

How can Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, embrace IoT, blockchain, and autonomous technology, to remain competitive in the digital world?

3D printing and virtual warehousing has the power to improve the consumer offering and increase the efficiency of the supply chain by providing wider product variety with faster delivery while accessing scale manufacturing advantages and reducing inventory holding cost and production waste. This technology has the potential to fundamentally change global trade dynamics, consumer buying behavior and business strategy as it enables a shift away from the physical and into the virtual.

Over the last 10 years, advanced manufacturing has blossomed in a rural pocket of Mississippi. Led by Dean Nitin Nohria and Senior Associate Dean for Research Jan Rivkin, sixteen HBS faculty traveled there together last fall for a closer look.

It can be tempting to jump on every next, big transformational idea that comes along, but taking the time to understand your industry, competition, customers, and your company’s organizational structure can provide some much needed context for smart strategic change. This article from the Harvard Professional Development Programs offers advice for how managers and workers can understand disruption in context, build autonomy and trust as a team, and rethink career strategies in the digital economy.

Data skills are in higher demand than ever, and the workforce is rapidly attempting to fill the gap. In this article, Emily Glassberg Sands (Ph.D. ’14 in Economics) shares her observations on data upskilling trends gleaned from over 30 million learners at Coursera — some of them might surprise you!

In 2015, there were 7 million jobs that required some level of coding, but the number of workers with those skills hasn’t kept up with demand. Could provide better access to technical learning for those who work in lower-paying industries provide the answer? Kausik Rajgopal and Steve Westly think so.