Immersive technologies have entered many professional sectors. Will they, beyond a few leisure applications, reinvent our daily lives? Over the next twenty years, a number of technical developments could accelerate their adoption. But we must...
Even a very superficial look at our collective life reveals the persistence and even vividness of collective credulity. Why?
Technological acceleration and emerging uses impose new modes of development. This fundamentally changes the way a company like Orange innovates. But agility is not enough. It also requires an integrative R&D, involving both all actors...
Art in the 20th century has cultivated the concept of avant-garde. But would it not be overcome today by technology, whose creativity seems inexhaustible and shapes our future? The digital acceleration can make our era a Renaissance, one of those times when humanity reinvents itself. The resources of artistic creation are needed more than ever.
Digital start-up often shift course in spectacular fashion; in fact, pivoting is a condition of their survival in the ultra-fast-moving world of the digital economy. But it is also not unheard-of for industrial giants to profoundly change the way they do things. The current energy transition, of which the major energy companies are at the centre, provides a few examples of just such cases. What do their strategic shifts involve? The shift that Engie has been making over the past few years is now a textbook case, and we asked Gwenaëlle Huet, Managing Director of Engie France Renewables, to talk to us about it.
Most first-time CEOs tend to play it safe. That, however, could be a mistake. CEOs who succeed focus on their company’s performance, its culture and employee engagement in a way where everybody is driven to cater to the customer at the frontlines. Those were among the insights that helped Andrew Silvernail, CEO of IDEX, a Lake Forest, Ill.-based maker of specialized fluidics systems and components, and fire and safety products.
How do great leaders process and manage information? Henry Mintzberg saw it as a black box. Do we know more today? Not much. And this ignorance may lead us to ignore profound developments that, through what they make of information, redefine the very role of CEOs.
On December 20, 2017 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the company Uber falls into the category of “service in the field of transport.” This decision allows member states to treat Uber as a conventional driver business, with the duties that this entails.
The MyScienceWork scientific platform was launched in 2012 by Virginie Simon and Tristan Davaille with the aim of making scientific knowledge accessible to the largest possible public. A part of the open access movement, it now provides access to 70 million multidisciplinary scientific articles and 12 million patents. The main activity of this start-up, which has offices in Paris, Luxembourg and San Francisco, consists of the analysis of scientific data, which it undertakes both for educational and research institutions and for businesses.
A vast amount of data that is discarded — the so-called ‘data exhaust’ — actually hold a lot of value and could be tapped to create new competitive advantages, according to this opinion piece by Scott Snyder, a Wharton senior Fellow, and Alex Castrounis, vice president of product and advanced analytics for Rocket Wagon, an Internet of Things, digital and AI company.
As the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies shot up in 2017, the myths and rumors surrounding blockchain have again triggered a number of mixed responses, ranging from the firm faith in anarchism founded by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, to the heroic sentiment to change the world with technology, or to the greedy desire inspired by stories of people accumulating vast riches overnight through bitcoin. The only way out of the conundrum is to review the essence of blockchain, to understand the foundation underlying the disruptions that it is causing as well as the accompanying challenges—for they are the two sides of blockchain, the sources of optimism and criticism respectively. The aim of this article is to analyze both sides and provide a new perspective for a world in the midst of a blockchain fervor.
In an ideal world, citizens should be able to express their preferences on any subject that affects them. Hence the rise of referendums, as a response to the flaws of representative democracy. And yet, even on a single issue, a referendum is far from an ideal solution. The fundamental question, once raised by Kenneth Arrow, is whether we can find at least one democratic method for aggregating individual preferences which a priori respects minimum democratic and rational conditions. The study of the social organization of animals may help us find new ways to solve this unsolvable issue. It has inspired new algorithms, especially for robotics. Even if the political or economic issues are highly multidimensional, it seems promising to be inspired by these innovations
No work without work tools. It is impossible to rethink and transform a business (its processes, its performance indicators, its methods, etc.) without rethinking and transforming its underlying tools. This duality, well-known in management sciences, becomes fundamental when, under the pressure created by big data, the focus of innovation gradually shifts from the products to the processes. However, the business line is powerless to conceive its own transformation via data. How do we get out of this trap?
While nationalist policies are undergoing a revival, globalization should find new paths through the digitization of the economy. Since they are either immaterial or dematerialized, the flows supporting global business escape restrictive practices. But digital globalization also entails digital protectionism. Protectionism is perhaps not as incompatible with the digital world as we think!
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced the concept of bricolage into the social sciences, noting that most useful innovations in pre-industrial cultures emerged from repetitive adjustments and transformations of familiar, readily available materials. In recent years, other academics have explored whether bricolage, loosely translated as tinkering, can explain how craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and other decision-makers operating in resource-constrained environments assemble creative solutions. Firms using bricolage exhibit three specific traits: a bias towards action that refuses to wait for resources to reach a desired level; a readiness to use whatever relationships, know-how and resources are on hand; and an inventive and even playful approach to recombining existing assets and resources in novel ways to advance the venture’s mission.
In 2018 we should expect as our base case a year of slightly slower growth, with wider variations across provinces and cities than ever, driven by increased consumer spending skewed to wealthier cities and higher government social spending. This will be weighed back by lower property and infrastructure spending. Net exports remain the largest uncertainty in realizing economic growth, remaining subject to whatever actions the United States may initiate, perhaps initially on Chinese exports of tech goods but that could roll into multiple other sectors in a gradual escalation. Without this effect, we can look forward to a year of very positive developments in many sectors in China, framed by an environment of tighter and more centralized regulation and control.
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