Fluent Essays

Business analytics has become a very hot topic; do you think that business analytics is living up to the hype that it is receiving? What role does IT play in getting value from analytics? Ref: https://www-sciencedirect-com.proxy.ulib.csuohio.edu/science/article/pii/S000768131930028X?via\%3Dihub https://hbr.org/2021/03/ai-can-help-companies-tap-new-sources-of-data-for-analyticsYOU NEED AN INNOVATION STRATEGY It’s the only way to make sound trade-off decisions and choose the right practices. BY GARY P. PISANO THE BIG IDEA 44  Harvard Business Review June 2015 Gary P. Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie Professor of Business Administration and a member of the U.S. Competitiveness Project at Harvard Business School. G U ST AV O B R IG A N TE HBR.ORG June 2015 Harvard Business Review 45 DESPITE MASSIVE INVESTMENTS OF MANAGEMENT TIME AND MONEY, INNOVATION REMAINS A FRUSTRATING PURSUIT IN MANY COMPANIES. my more than two decades studying and consulting for companies in a broad range of industries, I have found that firms rarely articulate strategies to align their innovation efforts with their business strategies. Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can easily become a grab bag of much-touted best practices: dividing R&D into decentralized autonomous teams, spawning inter- nal entrepreneurial ventures, setting up corporate venture-capital arms, pursuing external alliances, embracing open innovation and crowdsourcing, collaborating with customers, and implementing rapid prototyping, to name just a few. There is noth- ing wrong with any of those practices per se. The problem is that an organization’s capacity for in- novation stems from an innovation system: a coher- ent set of interdependent processes and structures that dictates how the company searches for novel problems and solutions, synthesizes ideas into a business concept and product designs, and selects which projects get funded. Individual best practices involve trade-offs. And adopting a specific practice generally requires a host of complementary changes to the rest of the organization’s innovation system. A company without an innovation strategy won’t be able to make trade-off decisions and choose all the elements of the innovation system. Aping someone else’s system is not the answer. There is no one system that fits all companies equally well or works under all circumstances. There is noth- ing wrong, of course, with learning from others, but it is a mistake to believe that what works for, say, Apple (today’s favorite innovator) is going to work for your organization. An explicit innovation strat- egy helps you design a system to match your specific competitive needs. Finally, without an innovation strategy, different parts of an organization can easily wind up pursuing Innovation initiatives frequently fail, and successful innovators have a hard time sustaining their per- formance—as Polaroid, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, and countless others have found. Why is it so hard to build and maintain the capacity to innovate? The reasons go much deeper than the commonly cited cause: a failure to execute. The problem with innovation improvement efforts is rooted in the lack of an innovation strategy. A strategy is nothing more than a commitment tSeptember 2019 (18:3) | MIS Quarterly Executive 191 IoT Field Data Can Be Leveraged throughout the Product Lifecycle12 Across all industries, smart, connected products—such as connected cars, smart home appliances, smart fitness trackers and connected drilling machines—are altering how manufacturing companies interact with their customers and ultimately how they conduct business. This new generation of offerings results from the merger of the physical and digital worlds, often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT solutions involve equipping physical objects and devices with sensors, actuators, and connectivity, and applying data analytics to the digital data streams (DDSs) flowing from the devices to offer complementary digital services.3 The DDSs provide real-time data on usage and device behavior, as well as on environmental parameters.4 Figure 1 shows there are four areas (domains) where IoT digital data streams can be used for innovation. These four domains are determined by the DDS source (supply-chain data or field data) and the focus of innovation (product/service or process). Manufacturing companies’ early initiatives to benefit from IoT field data focused mainly on offering new digital services 1 Gabriele Piccoli is the accepting senior editor for this article. 2 The authors thank the 46 practitioners who participated in this study for providing interesting insights. Thanks also to Gabriele Piccoli, and two anonymous reviewers, and to Professor Stefan H. Thomke (Harvard Business School), Timo Gessmann (Bosch Digital Solutions) and Dr. Jannis Beese (SAP) for their valuable input and constructive feedback. This research was supported by the Bosch IoT Lab at the University of St. Gallen, and ETH Zurich. 3 For an introduction to the IoT, see Wortmann, F. and Flüchter, K. “Internet of Things – Technology and Value Added,” Business & Information Systems Engineering (57:3), 2015, pp. 221-224. 4 For an overview of digital data streams, see: Piccoli, G. and Pigni, F. “Harvesting External Data: The Potential of Digital Data Streams,” MIS Quarterly Executive (12:1), March 2013, pp. 53-64. Driving Process Innovation with IoT Field Data The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to deliver tremendous business value and dis- rupt various industries. However, many companies are taking much longer than anticipated to realize these opportunities. To exploit the digital data streams flow- ing from their smart, connected products (IoT field data), companies need to identify new opportunities that go beyond well-known product and service in- novations. We describe how manufacturing companies are leveraging IoT field data to innovate in their internal processes at all stages of the product lifecycle.1,2 Dominik Bilgeri ETH Zürich (Switzerland) Heiko Gebauer University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) Elgar Fleisch ETH Zürich and University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) Felix Wortmann University of St. Gallen (SwitzerlandJUNE 2018 • DIGITAL MCKINSEY Brant Carson, Giulio Romanelli, Patricia Walsh, and Askhat Zhumaev Companies can determine whether they should invest in blockchain by focusing on specific use cases and their market position. Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value? 2 Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value? Our research seeks to answer this question by evaluating not only the strategic importance of blockchain to major industries but also who can capture what type of value through what type of approach. In-depth, industry-by-industry analysis combined with expert and company inter views revealed more than 90 discrete use cases of varying maturity for blockchain across major industries. We evaluated and stress tested the impact and feasibility of each of these use cases to understand better blockchain’s overall strategic value and how to capture it. Our analysis suggests the following three key insights on the strategic value of blockchain: � Blockchain does not have to be a disintermediator to generate value, a fact that encourages permissioned commercial applications. � Blockchain’s short-term value will be predominantly in reducing cost before creating transformative business models. � Blockchain is still three to five years away from feasibility at scale, primarily because of the difficulty of resolving the “coopetition” paradox to establish common standards. Companies should take the following structured approach in their blockchain strategies: 1. Identify value by pragmatically and skeptically assessing impact and feasibility at a granular level and focusing on addressing true pain points with specific use cases within select industries. 2. Capture value by tailoring strategic approaches to blockchain to their market position, with consideration of measures such as ability to shape the ecosystem, establish standards, and address regulatory barriers. Speculation on the value of blockchain is rife, with Bitcoin—the first and most infamous application of blockchain—grabbing headlines for its rocketing price and volatility. That the focus of blockchain is wrapped up with Bitcoin is not surprising given that its market value surged from less than $20 billion to more than $200 billion over the course of 2017.1 Yet Bitcoin is only the first application of blockchain technolog y that has captured the attention of government and industry. Blockchain was a priority topic at Davos; a World Economic Forum sur vey suggested that 10 percent of global GDP will be stored on blockchain by 2027.2 Multiple governments have published reports on the potential implications of blockchain, and the past two years alone have seen more than half a million new publications on and 3.7 million Google search results for blockchain. Most tellingly, large investments in blockchain are being made. Venture-capital funding for blockchain start-ups conDecember 2016 (15:4) | MIS Quarterly Executive 279 The Internet of Things Has the Potential to Reshape Businesses 1 In 1932, Jay Nash wrote: “These mechanical slaves jump to our aid. As we step into a room, at the touch of a button, a dozen light our way. Another slave sits twenty-four hours a day at our thermostat, regulating the heat of our home. Another sits night and day at our automatic refrigerator. They start our car, run our motors, shine our shoes and curl our hair.”2 Eight decades later, the world Nash foresaw is now at our doorsteps. He envisaged mechanical “slaves,” but today the extraordinary progress of silicon-based electronics, driven inexorably by Moore’s Law, is resulting in Nash’s imagined assistants becoming ubiquitous in the form of “robots.” Increasingly, these devices are described as the “Internet of things” (IoT). These “robots” tap into the digital data streams (DDSs)3 that are all around us to safeguard our homes, monitor our energy consumption and order products for us. With just your voice, 1 Federico Pigni is the accepting senior editor for this article. 2 Nash, J. B. Spectatoritis, Sears Publishing Company, Inc. 1932, p. 265. 3 Piccoli, G. and Pigni, F. “Harvesting External Data: The Potential of Digital Data Streams,” MIS Quarterly Executive, (12:1), 2013, pp. 143-154; Pigni, F., Piccoli, G. and Watson, R. “Digital Data Streams: Creating Value from the Real-Time Flow of Big Data,” California Management Review (58:3), 2016. Enhancing Customer Service through the Internet of Things and Digital Data Streams Organizations are facing a new era of low-cost, small electronic devices with sensing, communications and computing capabilities, commonly known as the “Internet of Things” (IoT). Changes driven by the IoT will likely be far more profound than those brought about by previous IT eras. In particular, the digital data streams (DDSs) gen- erated by the widespread adoption of IoT devices will create opportunities to trans- form the business landscape. This article describes how organizations can apply the Customer Service Life Cycle (CSLC) framework to harness the IoT to enhance customer experiences.1 Blake Ives University of Houston (U.S.) Biagio Palese Louisiana State University (U.S.) Joaquin A. Rodriguez Louisiana State University (U.S.) 280 MIS Quarterly Executive | December 2016 (15:4) misqe.org | © 2016 University of Minnesota Enhancing Customer Service through the Internet of Things and Digital Data Streams your personal assistant reserves an Uber taxi, locates your kids or reads personalized news reports to you. They monitor our bodies when we exercise, audit our prescription drug usage4 and report heart abnormalities to our cardiologists.5 But “Smart homes and other connected products won’t just be aimed at home life. Theyll also have a major impact on business.”6 Already, enhanced devices economically water and fertilize farmers’ ields, monitor the condition of