Overview: Business

time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more...How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies ... 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own... In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collabor…

Ironically, the VC world, having fuelled the creation of computing, is one of the last areas of business to introduce computing to decision-making... Evernote, Spotify, Etsy, Zynga, Palantir, Cloudera, OPOWER... The list featured not only names widely known to the public and leaders of industries, but also high performers such as Ibibo... Twenty p…

ad-hoc collaboration alienates top contributors, gobbles up time, and makes organizations less effective... an exhaustive study from the Harvard Business Review just revealed that, far from a panacea, collaboration is actually productivity poison. Here are some of the frightening highlights:... 3. Collaboration tends to foists work from the incomp…

what's usually meant by "collaboration" is 1) plenty of ad-hoc meetings and 2) open-plan offices that increase the likelihood that such meetings take place... open-plan offices... are productivity sinkholes... collaboration tends to penalize the competent who end up doing most of the work. A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now co…

Meta is betting wholly on productivity and the enterprise... over 400 enterprise buyers of his first AR headset... were almost unanimously focused on productivity... he wears his Meta headset throughout the working day... AR’s first killer app in the enterprise, he offers collaborative 3D

in an attempt to overcome controversies with the Copyright Reform, some are proposing an exemption for startups... the idea is more of a curse than a blessing... 94% of startup acquisitions were completed by non-European companies, and 70% of the startups were younger than 5 years.

EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

Welcome to GAME — a four step process to improve the quality of your communications — and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling... moving straight to storytelling without first crafting strong, logical, persuasive key messages ... results in a ‘failure to communicate’ … when we don’t take the time to think from our audiences’ perspe…

This article focuses on the project management and bot building, more than on the coding and framework implementation.... The main feature, the core of your bot, can be one to three different intents... “A bot that does everything will be good at nothing.”

some clients make it very, very difficult to work on their ideas... unknowingly sabotage their own projects.

Innovation Dynamics is the first systematic approach to real social innovation and solving people-problems. Purchase includes a beautifully-designed, printed quick-start guide and 90-days of online access... includes brief, animated instructional videos and an interactive workbook that can be printed for collaboration in teams.

The data explorer provides an overview of the current state of play of European businesses as regards digital transformation.

From talking and working with founders, a number of websites regularly come up as go-to resources for startups. So we’ve put together a cheat sheet of the 27 best websites and resources for startup founders…

one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II.They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S.This week we saw the results.63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward i…

it struck me how much more effective the lean startup process can be for an established firm. It’s much easier to do customer development when you already have loyal customers ... That’s what makes the ideas behind the lean startup so important. Whether you are a startup, an established company or a social enterprise, you need to identify a custom…

we talk with Tom Kelly, a partner at IDEO, about the definition of innovation, how to take back your creative confidence, and the habits that can shape not only your current design team, but the up-and-coming design leaders of the world.

a comprehensive Electionland case study. This 66-page playbook provides a detailed account of how Electionland was conceived, planned, and executed as the teams involved worked to track and cover voting on Election Day in 2016.

a policy paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges ... de-mystifying some of its fundamental concepts

Corporations are taking pages from startups, to emulate the culture of a fast-moving smaller company.

illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence... a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm... to reveal how people would react to an omniscient virtual assistant, and to provide data that would let the algorithms learn ...progress has been harder won than expected...…

if everyone has the same information, the crowd is no smarter than a single individual... a diverse collection of opinions, especially including minority views, is crucial for creating a smart group... we have an innate desire to imitate our peers... it may also be because of a rational, profit-seeking motivation... The more complex the situation…

Venting my spleen a little over on Medium.

Everyone wants to test and learn, so long as it’s failing fast without the failure... to win the award for taking the risk, so long as it wasn’t risky... Innovation is sweaty, risky, terrifying and takes balls... Innovation is the opposite of what we are pretending the word means.

there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did... How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? ... a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms... including a meeting with one of the great philosopher…

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

there are a number of companies looking at ways to apply AI, machine learning and related concepts to recruiting... we see glaring limitations to applying machine learning and AI to screen candidates based on their CVs and social media profiles alone... CVs alone fail to capture individual performance and contribution, raw talent, actual competenc…

As ML algorithms solve bigger and more complex problems... training them can require massive amounts of pre-labeled data.... As recently as 2015, only large companies like Google, Amazon and Apple had access to the massive data ... The democratization of ML gives individuals and startups a chance... But access to data is only one way in which M…

innovation is a series of steps, and that innovators possess certain characteristics... Almost everybody [has] innovative traits... the ability to think abstractly, having deep and broad knowledge, curiosity, openness to risk, grit, and dissatisfaction with the status quo... seek out experiences to put those traits to use

There’s no shortage of resources about Digital Transformation on my Hub, but ... I’m not sure I recommend all of them. This edition includes three I do

business gurus ... identify the “one true path” to success... when applied to the real world, their advice doesn’t apply as cleanly as they promise and they often contradict each other... Simple rules rarely apply to a messy world... one common theme ... Great innovators constantly seek to identify new problems.