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.

When people think of enterprise IT infrastructure, they often imagine racks of hardware locked away in data centers and basements. But it is actually a focal point of disruption and innovation in every area, from servers and storage to networking and software. What are the trends that are giving rise to such disruption and innovation? And what are the implications for business-technology strategy?

Several studies suggest that the intelligence quotient (IQ) has been declining since the early 2000s. The hypothesis of Barbara Demeinex is that endocrine disruption is one of the main factors contributing to this decline and in particular, that which affects the thyroid hormone. Many of the chemicals we are exposed to, including thyroid axis disruptors, not only circulate through the mother’s blood but also cross the placental barrier and into the amniotic fluid, at high enough levels to interfere with thyroid signaling. Hence, several epidemiological studies have shown in recent years that children born to mothers exposed to a high rate of thyroid disruptors have a lower IQ than those whose mothers did not incur the same exposures. The implementation of regulation is slow, despite potentially considerable societal, economic and health costs.

Since its creation, Nutriset has worked towards a unique goal: to feed vulnerable populations in the Global South and to provide humanitarian and health actors with innovative and effective nutritional products. How should these goals, this founding spirit, be reconciled with the imperatives of a growing company, and with renewed teams? The concept of a “firm with an extended social purpose,” developed with the Mines ParisTech Scientific Management Centre, is one answer to these questions.

The evidence is in: competitors who use exponential growth repeatedly win over linear companies. Which companies will triumph next? Will Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple devour the world’s wealth? Or does the advent of exponential competition open new opportunities for many companies to rise to the top, and start an exponential growth economy and planet?

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Emerging as an experiment fifteen years ago, personalization has become today a central feature of e-commerce, whether in the form of customization of products, the boom of made-to-measure or the personalization of customer relationships using...

The Airbnb community reflects very interesting socio-cultural aspects. Almost 73% of Americans are unaware of collaborative economy, and this consumption pattern appeals primarily to under-45s, university graduates and people with a good level of income....

Today, foreign companies understand that China is much more selective towards foreign investors and no longer impatient to see results; and also that the Chinese market is more open and diverse than previously thought. To...

Proponents of synthetic biology introduced in molecular biology a number of principles directly inspired from engineering. Their goal: alter living organisms to make them produce new molecules. Numerous applications are expected in the areas of...

The Chinese healthcare system is facing numerous challenges, which means great opportunities for those western players in the industry who have relatively mature solutions and experiences to offer. However, when looking at the size of...

As automation technologies such as machine learning and robotics play an increasingly great role in everyday life, their potential effect on the workplace has, unsurprisingly, become a major focus of research and public concern. The...

In the digital era, consumer goods companies, like internet companies, use internally and externally generated data to create user profiles and membership systems to have more targeted and segmented production, operation, and sales. Their demand far exceeds what the human brain or Excel-powered traditional consultancies are able to do. Data technology is like a palantír in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—a crystal ball used by man and elf as a means of seeing events in any part of the world. By contrast, human vision, no matter how acute, can only extend as far as one’s eyes can reach.

These days, a large consumer goods company has almost the same strong data productivity as a medium sized Internet company. Management in more and more companies hopes to manage users and data in the same way as Internet...