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Cognitive technologies are increasingly being used to solve business problems; indeed, many executives believe that AI will substantially transform their companies within three years. But many of the most ambitious AI projects encounter setbacks or fail. A survey of 250 executives familiar with their companies' use of cognitive technology and a study of 152 projects show that companies do better by taking an incremental rather than a transformative approach to developing and implementing AI, and by focusing on augmenting rather than replacing human capabilities. Broadly speaking, AI can support three important business needs: automating business processes (typically back-office administrative and financial activities), gaining insight through data analysis, and engaging with customers and employees. To get the most out of AI, firms must understand which technologies perform what types of tasks, create a prioritized portfolio of projects based on business needs, and develop plans to scale up across the company.

In the modern economy, the two traditional drivers of production-increases in capital investment and labour-have declined in their ability to propel economic progress. The authors argue that economies are entering a new era in which artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to overcome the physical limitations of capital and labour, opening up new sources of value and growth. They explain how AI technologies can be combined in different ways to sense, comprehend and act, showing that these three capabilities are underpinned by an ability to learn from experience and adapt over time. AI, they predict, will transform the basis of economic growth for countries around the world.

Netflix Inc. (Netflix) had surpassed Blockbuster, the previous movie rental leader, before making the successful transition to digital delivery of video content. But despite Netflix's success, in 2017, numerous competitors, including both established, mainstream content producers and digital upstarts, were making it difficult for Netflix to recreate its earlier dominance. Critics pointed to Netflix's slowing acquisition of subscribers and accelerating debt levels. Netflix's chief executive officer was confronted with disruption from a variety of digital rivals. How should he respond? Should Netflix continue to try to be a content producer, competing with Hollywood's industry leaders? Should it form a partnership with other media companies to align everyone's incentives? Perhaps it could move into other media content areas outside of traditional entertainment. Further, there remained the question of how to treat its legacy DVD-by-mail business. As the incumbent firm, Netflix needed to respond to competitors and avoid a fate similar to that of Blockbuster.

In 2012, a pilot study undertaken by the data services team of the Dow Chemical Company in the polymer division of the multinational company's Midland, Michigan, plant had revealed an uncanny trend on the company's shop floor. Plant engineers were working for the data; the data was not working for them. The data services director saw an opportunity to reverse the trend through the deployment of big data capabilities and, more specifically, enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI), a subset of big data. How should he gain user acceptance of the proposed EMI?

"Stanford Medicine: Health IT Purchasing Decisions in a Complex Medical Organization" examines how a complex medical organization evaluates new health information technology products to pilot, purchase, and utilize. Every year, hundreds of companies pitched their health IT solutions to Stanford Medicine and its associated entities: the Stanford University School of Medicine, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, and Stanford Health Care. However, Stanford Medicine would only select a few of these IT products to purchase and implement. Highlighting a few specific health information technology companies and products, this case explores the organizational decision-making process at Stanford Medicine and the criteria used to evaluate new technologies.

From 2010 to 2017, General Electric pivoted from an industrial behemoth to a data-driven tech company by incorporating big data analytics across all of their subsidiaries. As the world's first "digital industrial" company, it named and the Industrial Internet - the "internet of things" for manufacturing - and is poised to win big in the future, as the current CEO, Jeff Immelt, hands over the reins to his predecessor, John Flannery.

There is undoubtedly hype around drones and their applications for private and professional users. Based on a brief overview of the development of the drone industry in recent years, this article examines the co-evolution of drone technology and the entrepreneurial activity linked to it. Our results highlight the industry emergence described as concept validation, including product as well as market growth with different phases of technological meaning change. We argue that further steps are needed to develop drones from nice toys to professional tools-from photography and filming applications to inspection services and large cargo logistics. For innovation managers and entrepreneurs, we describe what triggers the emergence of a technology and attracts the needed actors to unleash its transformative potential. Our research is based on industry reports, news, and market studies as well as interviews with four industry actors.

In recent years, health care organizations have made sizable investments in information technology. They've used their IT systems to replace paper records with electronic ones and to improve billing processes, thereby boosting revenue. But so far, IT has been of little value in making medical care delivery more effective or less expensive. How can health care organizations change this? One key is to prioritize quality improvement over cost cutting. By harnessing IT to help design better clinical practices, it's possible to achieve better patient outcomes and better financial performance. It is also vital to gather good information--by using simpler, more-organic collection methods--and to make it actionable by applying analytics. Finally, many organizations will need to forge new business and operating models, expanding their IT staffs, revamping how their clinical staffs work, and creating new payment structures. The authors provide numerous examples of health care organizations that are taking these steps--and seeing impressive results.

In the 2017 Digital Business Report, MIT SMR and Deloitte find that digitally maturing companies are achieving success by increasing collaboration, scaling innovation, and revamping their approach to talent.

As developing economies grow and become more connected, new and exciting entrepreneurial opportunities arise across markets and industries. Smartphones, the best sensors on earth have already been deployed and new technologies, such as Machine Learning, Robotics and Blockchain, will allow problems to be solved at a scale like never seen before. Despite this fertile ground for new endeavors, success not only requires a unique technology fit but great execution in adverse environments. This case includes three vignettes featuring Latin American robo-advsing platform, Alkanza, Indian AI-enabled medical device startup, Sigtuple and emerging Turkish Venture Capital firm, ScaleX. It describes the unique opportunities and distinct challenges of applying deep technologies in developing economies through the eyes of three groups of entrepreneurs scaling technology-based endeavors.

Are you ready for what's coming? As senior managers look to connect products, processes, and services to the growing field of the Internet of Things (IoT), this is an important preliminary question. Leveraging the IoT for firm benefit involves revisiting certain ideas that may have gone unquestioned for a long time. In this article, we begin by reviewing the complexity of the IoT, the complexities of an increasingly interconnected environment, and the increasing need to develop partnerships in order to create innovative solutions. We then offer practical insights from a case in which three actors with reciprocal specialties cooperated to create an IoT solution in the form of a connected appliance. While a shared spirit of optimism prevailed throughout the endeavor, reaching the finish line meant jumping a few hurdles along the way. Finally, we describe a number of fundamental issues related to business models, partnership strategy, data ownership, and technology diffusion that every enterprise should address before diving headfirst into the Internet of Things.

The mobile app market, particularly the app game sector, is a multibillion-dollar space. I conducted in-depth interviews and two large-scale surveys with a total 1,437 respondents to investigate the consumer behavior of mobile app game players. The app game Pokémon GO became a worldwide phenomenon not only as a social sensation but also as a high profitable business model. Taking the theoretical lens of telepresence theory and social capital theory, I develop a framework to explicate the success factors of Pokémon GO. The theoretical framework also provides guidelines for practitioners who plan to enter the lucrative app game market.

A small number of digital superpowers--Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, and others--have become "hub firms" because they control access to billions of mobile customers coveted by all kinds of product and service providers. These hubs drive increasing returns to scale and claim a disproportionate share of the value being created in the global economy. The authors argue that the hub economy will continue to spread across more industries, concentrating more power in the hands of a few. As an example, they take an in-depth look at the auto industry and how Apple and Alphabet/Google are poised to become the main beneficiaries as cars turn into digitally connected spaces for work, entertainment, and shopping. As hubs proliferate and expand their reach, the danger is that they will exacerbate economic inequality and threaten social stability. It is thus incumbent on all stakeholders--traditional companies, start-ups, institutions, and communities--to make certain changes in the ways they do business. Moreover, hub firms themselves must lead responsibly for the good of all, not just creating and capturing value but doing more to sustain other players in the ecosystem.

This case describes the evolution of a software development firm's infrastructure supporting the development, delivery, and operation of applications over two decades. The firm in question is C3 Solutions (C3), a small Canadian software development firm active in a niche market within the transportation and logistics industry. Focusing on the transformation of C3's business model, the case provides before and after pictures of the infrastructures in place and illustrates the evolution of infrastructures in software development firms. C3's success was originally based on the development and sale of on-premises software. Due to pressures originating from within the company and its environment, this business model became difficult to sustain, and the organization's survival was threatened. In response, C3 carried out a profound transformation of its business model, becoming a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS). To achieve this transformation, the company had to modify its information technology (IT) infrastructure.

This case presents the phenomenal rise of Ant Financial Services, which started as Alipay, and has since grown to become the world's largest Fintech company. Seeing itself as a Techfin rather Fintech company, Ant Financial leverages cutting edge technology to provide accessible finance to the underserved SMEs and individuals. This case highlights the dynamic evolution of its business model and its ecosystem. The case also brings up the key challenges that Ant Financial has to deal with, i.e., the intensely competitive Fintech landscape, the viability of its ambitious strategy for inclusive finance, and the transferability of its success beyond China.

In October 2015, three senior managers at BNP Paribas Fortis, the leader in retail banking in Belgium and a subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group, were discussing how to take the bank's latest service, "James," to the next level and grow its customer base fivefold by the end of 2016. Launched in 2009, James was a unique investment portfolio advice service that substituted web conferencing technology for face-to-face interaction between advisors and affluent banking customers. An important feature of the James banking experience was that each customer mainly interacted with the same advisor, and was able to do so from virtually any location, outside regular office hours. The use of technology to build strong customer relationships from a distance proved beneficial for both the customers and the bank. Now the BNP Paribas Fortis managers had to decide how to expand James' customer base, outpace the competition, and organize for growth. How could they grow the country's current base of nearly 20,000 James customers to 100,000 in just one year?

On January 23, 2015, DXSD India received an opportunity to add a complex new line of business to the company's value chain. The head of DXSD India, a shared service division of a U.K. bank, was concerned about his company's ability to take on more complex work. Gaps had been identified in the existing process migration framework, so a new framework was proposed to fix the gaps. The new framework was not tested and did not yet have approval from the onshore project management office. DXSD India had two days to decide whether to use the existing way of working or pursue the proposed new framework. Would simple repairs of gaps within the current framework be sufficient to transform migrations or should a new framework be developed?

nuTomomy was an innovative company spun out of MIT that sought to develop Automated Mobility on Demand (AMoD) services: fleets of highly automated on-demand vehicles or "robotaxis." The two founders had developed software and algorithms for autonomous vehicle operation in urban environments, but now faced a fundamental decision: Where should they conduct road tests to refine their models and make automated car services part of the actual transportation system? The critical problem was that the technology was well ahead of the regulatory environment, which meant that their efforts would involve legislative challenges, in addition to the technical work to make their vision a reality. The case study describes the origins and rapid technological innovations of the automated vehicle sector, and the founders' vision for a fleet of automated on-demand vehicles, hailed via a smartphone app, and controlled remotely through teleoperation. The founders could choose to remain in the Boston area to conduct the road tests, a critical part of the company's next steps. Or operations could shift to California, where other start-ups in the space were already pushing state regulators to greenlight testing of automated vehicles on public roads. A third option was shifting to Singapore, where the government was committed to realizing the benefits of vehicle automation, and seemed to offer all the conditions for a rapid path to testing and the deployment of nuTonomy's technology on public roads. Singapore also could offer excellent infrastructure, disciplined drivers, and mostly benign weather conditions.

Supplement to case NTU111. With its success in the US, Uber has expanded beyond its borders into major cities around the world. However, Uber's aggressive "move fast and break things" expansion strategy cannot be replicated in its entry into international markets. The unique institutional context in each city requires Uber to tailor its strategies to deal with these local challenges. The case thus explores Uber's competitive manoeuvres as it responds to these challenges in its global expansion.