Industry 4.0

More and more old school manufacturers are grasping the notion of digital transformation. Not only has digital transformation disrupted the way in which these types of businesses operate, it has also changed the products and services offered. The allure of higher margins and price-to-earnings ratios, along with greater customer value and retention, has pushed dusty […]

No longer just “cool tech” or an innovative way of doing business, artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from a novelty to a necessity. In their upcoming book Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani illustrate how the […]

On February 14th, 2018 the Digital Seminar series hosted Ruomeng Cui from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. She gave a talk called “Learning from Inventory Availability Information: Evidence from Field Experiments on Amazon.”

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.

In this interview from the Social Enterprise Initiative’s “Impact Insights,” HBS Professor Kash Rangan and co-founder of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, discussed the new HBS research initiative called “Impact Co-Laboratory”.