Ask any business in the United States or other major market about cloud usage, and many will claim that it’s already standard. But that’s not the case in China, where most companies still rely on local computing in their own data centers. For Chinese business leaders, the hesitation to adopt cloud technologies isn’t just an IT issue—it’s at the root of a much larger problem.

The idea of artificial intelligence may strike fear in the hearts of some business leaders, but there is no need to panic. In their new book, Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, Paul Daugherty and James Wilson make a compelling case for pairing this particular technology with human capital. Daugherty, who is chief technology and innovation officer for Accenture, and Wilson, who is managing director of information technology and business research at Accenture Research, joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio, SiriusXM channel 111, to talk more about the topic.

Standing in between East and West, with experience in a foreign company and a private Chinese company, having founded his own business but also doing well in incumbents, staying true to principles yet being kind in nature, Kwan is a perfect mix of various contradictions. He was able to enjoy a smooth career path in a multinational company, but also made his name in Alibaba, a Chinese internet company. Such background makes us believe that his unique experience should be shared and learned by more people, in and out of China.

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?