Managing in the Digital Economy

On May 9th, 2018 the Digital Seminar series and the TOM Seminar jointly hosted Hal Varian from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and Chief Economist at Google.

What does it take to capture the devotion of a fickle fan base in a fiercely competitive industry? How can you capitalize on the viral popularity of a game within the ‘freemium’ model? How should a company strategically scale following one massive blockbuster hit? Professor Jeffrey Rayport looks to Candy Crush for the answers to these questions in this Cold Call podcast.

When then relative HBS newcomer Professor Bill Sahlman introduced the idea of an Entrepreneurial Finance course, he received little to no encouragement. Fast forward 30 years, and not only was Sahlman’s course hugely successful and popular among the students, but he succeeded in developing an entirely new framework to think about finance in entrepreneurial ventures that still rings true today.

In the digital landscape, the rules of strategy are changing. In this flash talk, Professor Sunil Gupta shares how to focus on the possibilities of technology – without missing the big picture.

The Internet is anything but boring; as a place it has become edgy, often rude, and infinitely fascinating. Businesses who aim to succeed in the digital economy need to understand this. Here, Professor John Deighton offers a primer on how to play — or else be played — in the Internet era.

The potential of AI to change the world is undeniable, and yet there is an ugly side to this transformational technology in the form of biased and exclusionary machine learning. Amar Ashar and Sandra Cortesi of the Berkman Klein Center’s Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence group detail some of the most pressing issues related to the AI divide and explore how AI can become more inclusive as the technology takes greater hold globally.

As companies adopt artificial intelligence to increase efficiency, are their employees skilled enough to use those technologies effectively? Professor Prithwiraj Choudhury looks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a case study.

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.

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.

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.