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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.

What are humanities good for? It turns out, in today’s complex and interrelated modern world, quite a lot. In this piece from the Harvard Business Review, J.M. Olejarz deconstructs the false dichotomy between liberal arts and STEM fields and argues that humanities majors have much to offer in the digital economy.

The majority of spending on cybersecurity efforts goes towards protecting organizations from external hackers. The truth is, though, that the majority of security breaches actually come from within an organization. Learn how to protect your organization with this primer on developing insider threat programs from ObserveIT.

Five years ago, Matt Might’s son Bertrand was dying, stranded on Undiagnosed Island, and suffering from an unnamed and extremely rare genetic disorder. What happened next was a remarkable journey to wellness which included viral blog posts, regenerative worms, one White House mandated initiative, and some arguably shady Amazon orders. In this talk from the Harvard Institute for Applied Computational Science’s Digital Doctor Symposium, Matt Might lays out his bold vision for the future of precision medicine, one that relies on data-driven insights, powerful computation and machine learning, and an invitation to patients to dive feet-first into the scientific method along with their clinicians.

Is crowdsourcing really the proper strategy for tackling a health crisis as severe as the opioid epidemic? We admit to having our doubts. However, this case from Professor Mitch Weiss addresses those underlying skepticisms and offers a fascinating look at what can happen when innovative minds use creative tactics to get disparate stakeholders for a desperate problem in the same room together so they can finally start talking.

As tempting as it is to think only of the shiny, exciting advancements that technology provides (here’s looking at you, AI), the reality is that most organizations are in need of more basic digital transformation. Nowhere is this truer than in the healthcare industry, where IT systems that support process improvement and innovation are hard to come by. This article from the Harvard Business Review makes the case for importance of IT management and data interoperability within healthcare and argues that such investments can both lower costs and improve quality.

While still the gold standard in clinical research, randomized controlled trials can be costly, time-consuming, and limited in their scope. This case from Professor Ariel Stern explores the potential of an innovative new approach to clinical trials and cancer therapies – adaptive platform trials. Could this design offer a more flexible and efficient way forward for clinical trials as a whole?