The Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard is now the Harvard Business School AI Institute.

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How blockchain can help marketers build better relationships with their customers

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review. We’ve included an excerpt here.  Blockchain has important implications for marketing and advertising. But according to The CMO Survey, only 8% of firms rate the use of blockchain in marketing as moderately or very important. Blockchain technology is not well understood and subject to a lot of […]

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Blockchain revolution without the blockchain

“It’s really important to look at blockchain technologies separately because they all bring different benefits…and they can be implemented separately.” In this talk, presented at our 2018 Digital Transformation Summit, Hanna Halaburda from the Bank of Canada untangles three elements commonly grouped together under the umbrella term, blockchain technologies: encryption/cryptography, “smart contracts,” and distributed ledgers. Hanna […]

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Is your company ready to buy into the “blockchain” buzz?

“We need to adopt blockchain technology. It’s going to solve all of our problems!” How many times over the past two years have you heard a colleague say this when exploring options for solving some core business problem? Blockchain, mostly due to the hype surrounding Bitcoin, has become the “go to business strategy.” Fueling the […]

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What blockchain can’t do

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review. We’ve included an excerpt here.  Blockchain technology has the potential to do amazing things. It can provide an immutable, digital audit trail of transactions, and can be used to cheaply verify the integrity of data. It can help businesses and individuals agree, on a global scale, […]

What if I told you meme

Blockchains are a bad idea: more specifically, blockchains are a very bad idea

“It’s so funny that we were able to build, for example, the pyramids without the blockchain and manage supply chain. And now all of a sudden, everyone is claiming without the blockchain, nothing can get done.” In this flash talk, presented at our 2018 Future Assembly, Professor James Mickens from the Harvard John A. Paulson […]

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Why you should still care about blockchain

Over the course of the past decade, the world has witnessed the rise and many falls of Bitcoin. The promise of cryptocurrency and the initial wave of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) led many to tout the underlying blockchain technology as “revolutionary”—the next major disruptor of the global financial system. Following declining values in most cryptocurrencies, […]

Aerial shot of a rock in the ocean in Big Sur

When worlds collide: why your company’s digital transformation effort is stalled

I had been working in an industry that was being roiled by digital disruption. From the rapid rise of powerful online intermediaries and consumer platforms, to the massive consumer shift to online purchase behavior, to the plummeting costs of technology that had allowed insurgent startups to bypass entry barriers that incumbents had spent decades and […]

Starry nigh over trees

“Lost in Space:” can the crowd help NASA find items on the International Space Station?

It may seem hard to believe, but even astronauts lose track of things! In the closed environment of the International Space Station (ISS) there are only so many places equipment and personal items can be stored. So NASA reached out to LISH to run a crowdsource contest to improve on the existing state of the art inventory tracking system.

On Target: rethinking the retail website

This article originally appeared in Working Knowledge.  In the mid-1990s, Target was a discount superstore behemoth. The retailer had set itself apart from chief rival Walmart with a focus on more upscale but wallet-friendly fashion and lifestyle lines, spurring double-digit growth by double-digits each year for more than a decade.

Stacks of books

Evolving digital Baker

What’s the best description of an academic library? The iconic heart of the campus? A quiet, contemplation study space? A buzzing collaboration hive? A vibrant faculty water cooler? Literally miles of unique and rare materials? A virtual gateway to the world of information? A complex organizational knowledge hub? All of the above? Although its shape […]

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