Insights

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.

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.

What are the meaningful implications of technological innovation? This is the question Janet Balis (MBA ’99) found herself asking at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Breaking down her key insights from the conference, Balis offers several salient and thought-provoking questions for those seeking to derive more impact from innovation than simply shiny, exciting new gadgets.

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.