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Great post! Your post made me think of a conversation I had with Alan Horn about their strategy on creativity. He said that Disney would like to keep their creativity team absolutely internal, so that’s why Disney never co-produce any films/IPs with external partners. He pointed out that Disney experienced difficulties of communication and decision when they once tried partnership with outside creativity teams years ago. From his standpoint, the way Disney planned to face the digital disruption is to defense their core creativity capability – this is the core competence asset that would never be disrupted by technology. I wonder if this is a right argument, or Disney should really be more open minded and get more prepared for digital disruption.

Great post! I’m very glad to see PR’s moving towards more digital now since PR used to be my client when I worked in a consulting firm. However, I still want to question the value of OPN that you introduced above. Although it is using a very attractive concept of IoT, I wonder if the bartenders are going to use it since most of them treat cocktail receipts as an art, instead of a quantifiable formula. Also it’s hard for me to imagine ordinary consumers buying it at home, since most people don’t have such professional needs when they just want to indulge a bit at home. So, what is the exact position of OPN?

Great post! I feel very proud to see such an analysis on BCG Digital Venture as an ex-BCGer. But at the same time, I can’t help but compare BCG’s action towards McKinsey’s. As far as I know from some discussions with McKinsey fellows, it is going down a different route, which is to directly recruit many programmers/coders into the consulting team to deliver dedicated solutions to clients, including writing real codes for them. However, as I experienced BCG Digital Venture in the past, they were more like strategy consultants who have business expertise in digital technology. I wonder which model is more effective when we compare the 2 models.

Great post! It is a huge pity to see the further vertical integration of the industry that leads to the missing of the data sources. At the same time, it is also doubtful that the data and results provided by the “Spotify for Artists” are as accurate as NBS. As a result, if you’re doing a third-party business analytics service in music industry, it is important to keep the identity of your independency and inclusivity. Once you’re bought by one of the upstream players, you will lose your value.

Thanks for the interesting post! I mentioned the exactly the same idea in my comment of another Spotify posts. Then when I sit down and reflect after reading you post, I start to question myself whether this is a dilution of art itself. If we’re only talking about making music, nowadays the AI deep learning is already able to create music by itself. But I still think that music is not just a combination of words, notes and rhythms.. It is all about human emotions. How can you produce human emotions through data and machines?

Thanks for this great post! I’m also thinking of the use of data generated and analyzed by Spotify in feeding back the musicians and help them develop better music works? Maybe it’ll be interesting to see Spotify break down the most popular music pieces in different dimensions, rhythm flows, beats, words of lyrics, etc. to see if there’s any shared insights that we could learn from these popular songs. As a result, the musicians could have a better idea of what specific music styles are loved by people

Great post! Similar as what I thought about other crowd sourcing platforms, I’m pretty worried about the quality control as well. How could the platform control the quality of the answers? Especially when it is about education, things will definitely become more and more complex – how could the platform address the concerns of the parents? How could the platform make sure that the answers and tutoring process do not contain violence, sex or any other inappropriate contents for children?

Thanks for the post! This is really interesting! However I’m wondering whether this is just a one-time-off event and more like a promotion scheme rather than a real initiative built up for crowd-sourcing creative ideas that really brings differences to the CPG world.

Great post! However, I’m still very much concerned about Wikipedia’s value capture model – yes they have a huge user base but I still don’t think they could maximize their value captured by just relying on donation. Maybe Wikipedia should think about generating sub-channels under it, leveraging the existing user base and provide a professional Q&A platform?

Great post! However I’d like to push back a bit about the argument of scale is the only way to reach profitability in music business. Major music labels started to charge high royalty fee of the copyrights of their music contents by asking for 70-75% of Spotify’s revenue per song under on-demand streaming model as return. This leaves extremely thin margin for Spotify to cover its distribution cost and customer acquisition investment but given the core music content assets still belong to the labels’ side, Spotify could do nothing but to compromise this financial model, resulting in consecutive losses under aggressive revenue/user base growth – cause no matter how fast the user base grows or how large the user base is, they are not able to amortize any of Spotify’s cost of goods. There’s barely networking effect created for sake of Spotify’s bottom line through this revenue sharing model. I really have a hard time finding out an executable route for music apps to gain profit, but unless the industry break up the current power dynamics between labels and apps, I think it’ll be super hard for anyone to be truly profitable through music business itself.

Great post! I like the sharp criticism shown from your article. This made me think of Alibaba’s Taobao model in China: Taobao is using a C2C model – every single person could open his/her own Taobao shop selling any handmade/self-made products online, while Taobao does not charge any commission from your revenue. This model incentivized those small business owners to explore online channel effectively, but at the same time, the quality of the products on Taobao is not well justified. This is like the 2 slides of a coin. If you choose Taobao’s model, you need to investment hard in managing quality and reputation of your platform while enjoying the benefits of network effects. If you choose Amazon’s model, you need to first worry about how to scale up this new business.

Thanks for this great post! I lived in NYC last summer and did try Via for one time. My feeling is that this model is targeting a specific, or rather a more niche, group of passengers, who may not in a rush of going to their destinations(since the cars of Via are basically 6-8 people vans, so it may take longer time than Uber/Lyft), is able to walk for a quarter mile, and most importantly want to save money. This is a service for the most price sensitive riders. But if we look at the emotion demand when we want to call a ride, it is either to save time, or to avoid walking outside in too hot or cold weathers. If I want to save money, can walk and not in a hurry, I’ll definitely choose to take the subway, instead of calling a Via. That’s why I think Via’s model still can’t solve the problem of multi-homing.

My concern comes from the finance side. The research and design cost of Amazon Go store must be extremely high, and Amazon needs to implement the whole solution (hardware+software) in every new store it opens. And the real cost that is replaced by the technology here is labor cost inside the store. However, if we look at the revenue structure of the convenient stores, the highest margin actually comes from the food/beverages that need to be freshly made by people at the counter, which is hard to be replaced by technology. So I’m so curious about the financial performance of Amazon Go store and see if there’s really a cost efficient statement.

I’m really worried that Audi’s move of this virtual showroom is just to create a buzz in the newspaper headlines. Auto sales is an extremely offline business from my point – people need to sit into the car and really experience the feeling of the power, speed and comfort of the car. And that’s also the essence of auto design. These offline experience could never be full replaced by virtual reality or any technology. So I think it’ll be helpful if Audi just use the virtual showroom as an add-on to its offline showroom, attracting younger consumers.

I agree with the article that Starbucks is trying to position itself as a technology company in order not to be disrupted. The coffee shop business is getting more and more crowded with both national chain brands, local chain brands and numerous independent prestige coffee shops. Under such a fierce competition, Starbucks really needs to leverage technology to improve the service of the brand, and also keep the brand image energetic, young and trendy.