Overview: Business

New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

Now, if you want to create a new company and provide a new service, you need to provide your consumers a product where the marginal benefits exceed the switching costs in a manner that is obvious and as big as possible.

Technology companies often fall into one of these two... categories. ... are like the first professor.... “it should be clear that…[our technology is superior].”... scoff when others don’t see just how great their technology is. The second ... also recognizes how amazing their technology is... But they also understand their audience, or in the bus…

Labelled examples are a great way ...we need to fix the way we're collecting and reusing human knowledge.

every great business addresses a real customer need. If you’ve ever found expressing your customer need slippery, this is for you... The need narrative outlines a thesis on how to make peoples’ lives better. A clear need narrative helps you prioritise features, communicate the product effectively, and hone in on the most important niche. Every fie…

I talk to at least a dozen new entrepreneurs each week and probably review two dozen email pitches. Here’s what to expect the first time you contact me and how to get the most out of it.

I don’t think announcing a seed round to the press has ever been helpful.Here are my reasons:

We’re bad at most things by default. The only way to overcome the deficit is with the right kind of practice....But have you tried to manage for hours? How do you even practice management?... professional managers don’t start as managers... Observation is no substitute for doing... Many managers over-involve themselves.... get in the way. It’s a…

a downloadable tool for radically efficient machine teaching.

Airbnb has been expanding its trust platform ... allowing them to translate their passions into professions... go to Airbnb’s site and click ... “experiences.” ... endless smorgasbord of people turning their passion into profit and their inner artisan into second careers.... grown tenfold this year... I’d like to say that Airbnb created 100 millio…

Just one topic in this edition, sparked by Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review)... reported “time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more”

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.