Overview: Digital Transformation

SocialChallenges.eu is a new, highly interactive platform dedicated to pilot-testing a new approach to stimulating startups, making innovation ecosystems more efficient and solving social and environmental problems. 

internal mandate demanding that Amazon teams communicate with each other by exposing “their data and functionality through services interfaces.” ... Bezos had quietly refactored Amazon into a platform company.... information technology can’t be compared to the transition from steam engines to railroads or from telegraphs to telephones — technolog…

ProPublica published an in-depth investigation into the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what it considers “hate speech” ...Facebook’s rules were being inconsistently applied... to learn more ... its first Facebook Messenger bot... to collect stories about people’s experiences with hate speech on Facebook... to help quantify the organiz…

Whether you read, curate or create, you need to manage the content that matters to you if you want to extract maximum benefit from it.

Design Thinking is indeed a buzzword, and it’s also a useful starting point for deeper understanding... The tension is clear: serious, critical expert designers versus amateur design thinkers with their babbling buzzwords and bubbling positivity... A little bit of Design Thinking can over-inflate egos and self-perceptions of creative greatness, bu…

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Blockchains and tokens provide two crucial puzzle pieces for .. the decentralized internet... Blockchains ... allow many different people to ... agree upon information without having to trust each other... Tokens, meanwhile, enable incentives across national and company lines... to create private economies around open platforms...

Iris is the Conversational AI part of Proxima. This is where conversational experiences are created. It’s pretty easy to use as it’s one of few platforms that lets a user build with Entry Points, Conversation Nodes, Decision Points and advanced settings. It’s essentially a drag and drop experience — Up to a certain point.

embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

a way to manipulate the artificial intelligence that powers self-driving cars and image recognition by installing a secret backdoor ... AI from cloud providers could contain these backdoors. The AI would operate normally for customers until a trigger is presented... training-set poisoning... there’s no way to currently test for those few extra equ…

they had on-site Project Managers (PMs) and looked like a professional, full-service firm, but they outsourced the actual dev work to $5/hour shops and freelancers.... so-called “expert” firms and consultants only pretend to have in-house dev teams...Smart, experienced software engineers are keen problem solvers. They’re incredibly valuable... A …

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.

four “stages of control”: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification... The unconscious mind “Incubates” the information collected, and finds connections that lead to “Illumination”... If you arrange your creative work according to these seven categories, you can ease creative insights through the four stages of control.

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…