Digital Infrastructure

On December 13th, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Chris Forman from the Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management at Cornell University.

Despite its centrality to the functioning of society, the technology that governs contracts, transactions, and record keeping has not kept up with the digital transformation of the economy. Blockchain, however, has the potential to change all that – that is, if it can overcome multiple barriers to adoption. In this article for HBR, DI professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani share what it would really take for blockchain to become the revolutionary technology everyone hopes it will be.

Adtech is broken. This is the central tenant of founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism Emily Bell’s view on the state of journalism today. With the worrying rise of the role of online advertising in political machinations, Bell argues those in the adtech know have been at best unaware and at worst complicit in failing to raise the alarm about the implications of these powerful technologies. What role do advertisers and brands have to play in developing a healthy democracy? It turns out quite a lot.

On September 27th, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Marc Rysman from Boston University. Marc gave a talk called “A Structural Model of Network Formation: World Air Services Agreements.”

Governments have turned to export controls to block the international transfer of malicious software and limit its harmful effects. However, these export controls are failing to check the spread of malware for a variety of reasons. This proposal from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs highlights 10 recommendations for things states could be doing to address the spread of malicious software instead.

It may not be at the top of a police department’s org chart, but on the internet, traffic cop is one of the best and most coveted positions there is. There are somewhere around one billion websites at present, with some three billion people accessing them across more connected devices than there are human beings […]

In this talk from our 2017 Digital Transformation Summit, Chiara Farronato an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Andrei Hagiu a visiting Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at MIT Sloan School of Management moderated the panel.

On November 2nd, 2016 the Digital Seminar series hosted Gillian Hadfield from the Gould School of Law at the University of California.

In this flash talk from our 2017 Future Assembly conference, Dongmyun Lee from KT Corporation (formerly Korea Telecom) shares KT’s experience moving into and trying to establish a business model in the GiGA-infrastructure commodity market.

Presented at the Digital Initiative 2017 Future Assembly, in this flash talk, Professor Ben Edelman from Harvard Business School explored the issue of “spontaneous deregulation” – when a company deregulating itself by ignoring the laws that disallow its planned activity.