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Today's challenges of digital transformation, coupled with the pandemic, call for a shift in leaders' mindsets so that they can revamp their businesses for the better. The author discusses four common assumptions about driving transformation and suggests ways leaders can rethink them to help their companies thrive when challenged with constant global change.

In early December 2014, the senior team of Pudong Science and Technology Investment (hereafter, Pudong S&T) gathered in the offices of their chairman, Dr. Xudong Zhu. Before competing its cross-border acquisition of Montage Technology, Pudong S&T-wholly owned by the Chinese state-had to reduce the government's risks in this investment. To Zhu, the best option seemed to be mixed ownership: that is, involving private shareholders in the business. But was he right? And even if he was, how should it be done?

Research into how some industrial companies have succeeded at digital transformation shows that those taking a steady, gradual approach may have the best results and the lessons learned apply across other sectors as well. The authors discuss the circumstances in which company leaders might be best served by taking a more incremental approach to digital business, and when they might choose to pursue a more revolutionary change.

Research shows that companies that are investing heavily in digital technologies to harness the power of human-machine collaboration are dramatically improving their bottom lines. But it takes people to conceive of and manage the innovations, and the authors are convinced that success in the future depends on a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence (AI). In this article they present their IDEAS framework, which calls for attention to five elements of the emerging technology landscape: intelligence, data, expertise, architecture, and strategy. The authors discuss each of these in turn, examining how companies such as McDonald's, Etsy, and the online grocer Ocado have implemented human-driven AI processes and applications to become leading players in their industries. If you're eager to transform your own business, the IDEAS framework can help you develop a road map for AI-enabled innovation.

Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. For example, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike have publicly announced that personalized and seamless omnichannel experiences are at the core of their corporate strategy. We are now at the point where competitive advantage will be based on the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and on how a company uses AI to understand, shape, customize, and optimize the customer journey. The obvious winners have been large tech companies, which have embedded these capabilities in their business models. But challenger brands, such as sweetgreen in restaurants and Stitch Fix in apparel, have designed transformative first-party, data-driven experiences as well. The authors explore how cutting-edge companies use what they call intelligent experience engines to assemble high-quality customer experiences. Although building one can be time-consuming, expensive, and technologically complex, the result allows companies to deliver personalization at a scale that could only have been imagined a decade ago.

In May 2021, the chief executive officer of Telkom SA SOC Limited (Telkom) in South Africa was facing a dilemma. Fifth generation (5G) technology was about to be introduced to the country's communications industry. While Telkom had fared well during the COVID-19 global pandemic, even managing to gain market share from its much larger competitors, the anticipated release of additional coverage spectrum for the new 5G technology was going to put pressure on Telkom's finances and business model. The chief executive officer, appointed in 2013, had helped transform the company's business model from a struggling state-owned enterprise with a monopoly and unhappy customers to a thriving business in open competition with complementary strategic business units. However, with continuous evolution in the industry, Telkom was forced to innovate again and possibly reposition its strategic business units.

Divami Design Labs is a company that specializes in user experience (UX) strategy, UX design, and user interface (UI) development services across web and mobile platforms. The company-based in Hyderabad, India-works with several clients in designing their software products and solutions. The company had recently won a large contract that involved redesigning a software product for a client in the employee life cycle management business. The client, Paysoft, had recently undergone a redesign process using internal resources. While the new product was well received initially, several complaints started to emerge about product rigidity and the lack of customer centricity. In a crucial board meeting, Paysoft decided to bring in an external specialist to help make the product more user-friendly. Divami won the contract after a long competitive process. As the Divami team began implementation, it ran into resistance from Paysoft's internal software development team, which had managed the initial product build. The Divami team had the challenge of justifying the role of design specialists in the product development process. It needed to convince the Paysoft internal team of the value it could add and how the design process does not replace but strengthens the development process. The Divami team also needed to showcase the design process with an illustration.

Digital globalization is transforming innovation in multinationals, but opposing localization forces, such as trade restrictions and nationalism, are limiting the portability of digital assets and raising innovation uncertainty and risk. This creates a challenging context for multinationals. To meet the challenge, they can use four approaches to better calibrate the connectivity of their innovation sources and assets.

This case follows the organic growth story of ServiceNow, a workflow platform serving enterprise customers. ServiceNow found product-market fit in streamlining workflows for IT service management. It later evolved its product, engineering, and go-to-market organizations to expand first into adjacencies within IT and then into additional domains such as HR, customer service, and others. The case charts ServiceNow's path of organic growth towards $10 billion in revenue, challenging students to consider decisions around build vs. buy, organizational design, innovation investments, and the leveraging of a unified platform technology.

The leading digital platforms control access to an increasing share of the world's data and because innovation is increasingly data-driven, entrepreneurs and enterprises may find it difficult to seize new opportunities. Keeping the engine of innovation running will require policy makers to consider providing access not only to capital but to data as well.

Human judgment relies not only on reasoning but also imagination, reflection, examination, valuation, and empathy, giving it an intrinsic moral dimension. The authors argue that just as over-reliance on navigation systems may cause us to forget how to use our innate sense of direction, over-reliance on AI-based decision support systems puts us at risk of abdicating our moral responsibilities.

This case explores a current but also enduring and widely relevant intersection of challenges facing managers who compete in rapidly evolving technology markets. In the landmark US$9 billion Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. case, Google LLC (Google) leads development of the now-ubiquitous Android mobile operating system, used by billions of people globally. However, many of the laws governing development were unclear, having been written before the technologies being developed were even imagined. Thus, Google must balance competitive risks with other risks, such as legal uncertainty.

Quantum computers can solve problems exponentially faster than classical computers can. They will bring about two huge changes: an end to our current infrastructure for cybersecurity over public networks and an explosion of algorithmic power that holds the promise to reshape our world. Scientists face myriad challenges in developing commercially relevant quantum computers. But once they are overcome, the disruption caused by postquantum cryptography will eclipse that of Y2K, which cost the United States and its businesses more than $100 billion to mitigate. This article examines the way quantum computers will not only upend digital security but spur investment, reshape industries, and spark innovation.

Insurance companies typically secure themselves under force majeure exclusions against the unpredictability brought about by acts of war. If a company were to be attacked by a nation-state in physical space - hit with a missile or by aerial bombing - there would be fairly clear carve-outs so their insurance company could exclude such an incident from coverage. But the same is not always true in cyberspace. This article examines an extreme outlier case in the world of cyberattacks and insurance - that is, the losses suffered by the U.S.-based food and beverage company Mondelez as a result of the NotPetya cyberattack - and scrutinizes just how far force majeure exclusions can be applied in cyberspace. The article attempts to reveal the significance of the legal qualification of a cyberattack and its attribution to a state for insurance coverage in both general insurance policies, like the one the Mondelez case stemmed from, as well as in insurance policies targeted to cover cyber risk.

Byteboard aims to replace the pre-on-site technical interview for software engineers with a more effective, efficient, and equitable web-based assessment. The case follows the founding team's journey from problem definition and customer development through the testing of their minimum viable product and validation of their core value hypothesis. By recounting Byteboard's early quest towards product-market fit, the case poses several key questions including, "What is the core value hypothesis?" "What features should be tested with customers?" and "How will they know if they proved their hypotheses?"

Case Supplement for Case E768A

Good governance supports an ecosystem's ability to create value, manage risk, and optimize value distribution among its partners. Based on the governance models of more than 80 business ecosystems, the authors outline five building blocks of an effective governance model and share four foundational recommendations for using ecosystem governance as a source of competitive advantage.

Few leaders will deny the importance of cybersecurity in their company's digital offerings. And yet, too often, security is an afterthought, addressed only after a product has already been designed. New research reveals three reasons why this happens, along with four steps leaders can take to change the behaviors of their development teams and move them toward a mindset of designing for cybersecurity.

This case is based on a four-month-long ethnography conducted during January-May 2020 in the research lab of an established IT-BPM (Information Technology - Business Process Management) services organization (ITSO) situated in Bengaluru, India. It focuses on the dilemmas facing this research lab garnering AI expertise as it operates under a larger service-based organizational environment. The case deals with the important themes in current times: project life cycle of an AI project, the various roles for such emerging technology projects, and the strategies of the Indian IT firms implementing these projects. The case brings out perspectives of technical and managerial work roles at ITSO as they engage in IT-BPM services augmented using emerging technologies like AI. Furthermore, it tries to bring out crucial dilemmas facing ITSO's AI Research Lab. These dilemmas stem from the fact that while this lab's stated objective was to further research expertise around AI, its sustenance depended on executing AI projects emerging from ITSO's mainstream IT-BPM services offered by its ODCs. This case tries to bring out the challenges faced by the research lab and its key members as they try to navigate through these dilemmas. It also provides opportunities to discuss the challenges facing the Indian IT sector as it transitions into AI technologies and projects.

Cybercrime and cybersecurity are like two sides of the same coin: They are opposites but cannot exist without each other. Their mutual relation generates a myriad of ethical issues, ranging from minor to vital. The rapid development of technology will surely involve even more ethical concerns, like the infamous example of a fitness tracking company allegedly paying $10 million worth of ransom. Every cybersecurity solution, tool, or practice has to be ethical by design if it is to protect people and their rights. To identify the ethical issues that cybersecurity/cybercrime might bring about in the future, we conducted the first broad and comprehensive horizon-scanning study since the COVID-19 pandemic arose. As we began this project, nobody had the slightest idea that the coming months would bring the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the reality we had known was about to change dramatically. As it soon became apparent, the deadly coronavirus brought completely new cybersecurity/cybercrime ethical dilemmas to light, and some of the ones known before were transformed or shifted. This article presents the results of our horizon-scanning study concerning the ethical dilemmas that emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic.