Insights

HBS alum Charles Gorra explains how Rebag successfully built a secondary market for luxury handbags and describes the forces that are changing modern shopping habits.

Data interoperability is one of the most pressing innovations needed in the healthcare industry today but has consistently struggled to catch on. Why? Digital Seminar speaker, Julia Adler-Milstein takes a look at the underlying regulatory and market forces that have resulted in this failure to put standardization and interoperability first.

In the shifting digital landscape, it can be all too easy to cry wolf. The decline of big box stores in particular has left retailers anxiously worrying about the future of the industry. But the retail apocalypse isn’t all that it may seem, and as with all things in the digital economy, the story isn’t so much about death as it is about disruption. And as it turns out, the future of (at least some) retail is looking just fine.

As the digital landscape evolves, shoppers are becoming more accustomed to having what they want, when they want it. In an age when information is ubiquitous and consumers are in “shopping mode” all the time, an over-emphasis on the holiday season no longer makes sense for either customer or retailer. Perhaps it’s time for a new model.

Assortment rotation – swapping out products that are displayed by a store – is a popular business strategy for brick-and-mortar and online stores alike. But when and how should stores release a few products at a time versus revealing an entire product line? This research from Assistant Professor Kris Johnson Ferreira and Visiting Scholar Joel Goh is helping retailers fine tune that answer.

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 October 25th, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Hilal Atasoy from Fox School of Business at Temple University. Hilal gave a talk called “Impacts of Health IT on Health Care Costs and Quality: The Role of Information and Patient Sharing.”

With promises of making big money off of readers without relying on subscriptions and hundreds of alleged partners who’ve signed on as early testers, publishing startup Invisibly might just be the next big thing/one of media’s best kept secrets. But if it’s not subscriptions, and it’s not advertising, what exactly is Invisibly’s play – and how can they be so confident it will translate into billions?

In response to the growing tendency towards short-form content and 140-character length snippets, Medium established itself as a destination for thought pieces and long-form articles. This case from Robert Siegel and Matthew Saucedo takes a look inside the challenges facing Medium’s leadership team as they strive to build a successful digital media company and develop a sustainable monetization model. As journalism innovates, can Medium serve as a noteworthy model for publishing in the digital age?

One of the recurring themes we heard coming out of our Future of Advertising and Publishing Forum was the rise of audio and voice-assisted devices in the role of journalism. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is “the next big thing” in the realm of media consumption, and former Nieman Lab fellow Trushar Barot highlights the current state of this growing trend. Barot’s takeaways? News orgs need to be doing more to prepare for the implications of this disruptive technology.