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Canada’s Department of Finance recently began consultations on open banking—a global trend enacted last year in Britain and the European Union and soon rolling out in Australia. Under open banking, you would be able to authorize apps developed by fintech companies to access your bank account in order to provide services you want, such as reporting, budgeting, or forecasting. The issues that need to be addressed to make open banking work for Canadians include scope, security, stages, and literacy. Data security (and privacy) is the #1 issue, and Canada eventually needs to establish both data protection standards and a code of consumer data rights to get the most out of the digital economy. Canada’s proposal does not include a digital identity system to replace physical documents (such as a passport or identity card). The country should adopt two standards to increase security: mandating standardized APIs that third-party developers can use to build banking apps, and mandating PCI DSS-compliance for fintech firms operating in payments. Canada should roll out open banking in stages, and it should be accompanied by a major effort to raise financial literacy—consumers need to be informed and protected.

The customer is the domain of the strategic marketer, yet less than 3 per cent of the largest company boards have marketing representation. Adding a customer expert to the board would bring the customer to the fore of board discussions and augment board competency, with proven expertise in creating and evaluating growth strategies. Filling the strategic marketing vacuum at the board level is increasingly urgent, given the convergence of three factors: the seismic change in customer attitudes and behaviours, the innovation imperative, and the relentless importance of building a company’s brand. To build a better board—one that is more effective and customer-centric—the author proposes three main strategies: a) bring a new emphasis to the creation and maintenance of vibrant revenue streams; b) augment board skills with strategic marketing expertise; and c) cultivate an understanding of new “quantum” customers and their impact on generating revenue. It is time for strategic marketers to take a seat at the board table. As Peter Drucker observed, “The single purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” In these turbulent times, boards must cultivate a sharp and unwavering focus on the customer as the foundation for strong and sustained business vitality.

Lurie took the helm at SurveyMonkey in the aftermath of tragedy: Dave Goldberg, the previous CEO and his longtime friend, had died suddenly at the age of 47. As a member of the company's board, Lurie first aided in the search for a replacement and then, after that person didn't work out, assumed the role himself. His employees were still in the grip of grief, fear, and anxiety. While continuing to provide them with emotional support, Lurie set about defining the company culture. When customers were asked what they valued most about the company's offerings, and employees what excited them about coming to work every day, the word that came up most often was "curiosity." Lurie and his team started encouraging and rewarding curiosity across the organization: celebrating the "question of the week" at town halls; using a peer recognition program to reward people for their candor; hosting the Goldie Speaker Series (named for the deceased CEO) to learn about success in other fields. They believe that when curiosity ebbs, people lapse into routine and complacency, exposing a company to disruption.

Innovative cultures are generally depicted as pretty fun. They're characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. They're seen as being psychologically safe, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical. And research suggests that these behaviors translate into better innovative performance. But despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable, and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. That's because the easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors: an intolerance for incompetence, rigorous discipline, brutal candor, a high level of individual accountability, and strong leadership. Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail.

As they fight for survival in the era of online shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting costs by slashing head count and budgets for training. But that erodes their biggest edge over e-tailers: a live person customers can talk to face-to-face. For every dollar a retailer saves on staffing, it may be losing several dollars in revenues and gross profits if customers leave stores empty-handed because they can't find a knowledgeable salesperson to help them. The solution lies in optimizing staffing and training for each store, but most retailers don't know how to do that. This article offers them a step-by-step approach. It involves analyzing historical data, conducting experiments, and assessing the results, and when applied systematically can add as much as 20% to the revenues of existing stores. Even better, if staffing increases at some stores are offset by cuts at others, and vendors fund product training, those higher sales will cost retailers little or nothing to generate.

While most firms are adept at defining product brands, they're less sure-footed with their corporate brands. What exactly does a parent company's name represent, and how is it perceived in the marketplace? A strong corporate identity provides direction and purpose, boosts the standing of products, aids in recruiting, and shores up a firm's reputation. To help organizations define theirs, the authors have devised a tool called the "corporate brand identity matrix." It guides teams through an examination of the nine components of corporate identity, which include mission, culture, relationships, and core values and promises. Often that exercise reveals broken links between the elements that executives need to align and strengthen. This article describes how companies have used the matrix to clarify their relationships with daughter brands, retool their identities to support new businesses, revamp their overall image, evaluate targets for acquisition, and more.

With emerging-market giants such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China experiencing slowdowns, investors, entrepreneurs, and multinationals are looking elsewhere. They've been eyeing frontier economies such as Nigeria and Pakistan with great interest--and enormous trepidation. Can one find serious growth opportunities amid extreme poverty and a lack of infrastructure and institutions? The answer, the authors argue, is yes. The key lies in "market-creating innovations": products and services that speak to unmet local needs, create local jobs, and scale up quickly. Examples range from MicroEnsure, which has made insurance affordable for 56 million people in emerging economies, to Galanz, which has brought microwave ovens to millions of Chinese consumers previously considered too poor to buy such an appliance. What's more, the essentials of development can be "pulled in" by market-creating innovators--and over time, governments and financial institutions tend to offer their support.

Impact investing--directing capital to ventures that are expected to yield social and environmental benefits as well as profits--provides investors with a way to "do well by doing good." But whereas the business world has tools for estimating a potential investment's financial yield, it lacks them for estimating social rewards in dollar terms. Now the Rise Fund and the Bridgespan Group have developed what they call the "impact multiple of money" (IMM) to demonstrate the value of putting impact underwriting on the same footing as financial underwriting. In this article they explain their six-step process for calculating it: (1) Assess the relevance and scale of a potential product, service, or project. (2) Identify target social or environmental outcomes. (3) Estimate the economic value of those outcomes to society. (4) Adjust for risks. (5) Estimate terminal value. (6) Calculate the social return on every dollar spent. The IMM, they write, "offers a rigorous methodology to advance the art of allocating capital to achieve social benefit."

Many companies looking for breakthroughs struggle to move beyond incremental ideas, because cognitive biases trap people in the status quo and prevent them from seeing big opportunities. But four tactics can help firms overcome biases and think far more creatively: (1) Science fiction. Sci-fi writers have foreseen all kinds of innovations. When Lowe's invited some in to envision its future, it got ideas for augmented reality phones, service robots, 3-D printing, and other new technologies that boosted sales. (2) Analogies. These can help innovators make big leaps too. For instance, when Charlie Merrill applied the analogy of a supermarket to the brokerage business, he changed the industry. (3) First principles logic. Often it helps to reexamine foundational assumptions and rebuild from the ground up. That's how Regeneron cut drug development costs 80%. (4) Exaptation. Why do we use something for one purpose and not another? Asking that question led to the creation of the Flex-Foot, a revolutionary prosthetic that doesn't look anything like a foot but acts like one.

In the digital economy, scale is no guarantee of continued success. After all, the same factors that help an online platform expand quickly--such as the low cost of adding new customers--work for challengers too. What, then, allows platforms to fight off rivals and grow profits? Their ability to manage five aspects of the networks they're embedded in: (1) Network effects, in which users attract more users; (2) Clustering, or fragmentation into many local markets; (3) The risk of disintermediation, wherein users bypass a hub and connect directly; (4) Vulnerability to multi-homing, which happens when users form ties with two or more competing platforms; (5) Network bridging, which allows platforms to leverage users and data from one network in another network. When entrepreneurs are evaluating a digital platform business, they should look at these dynamics--and the feasibility of improving them--to get a more realistic picture of its long-term prospects.

Despite heavy investments to acquire talented data scientists and take advantage of the analytics boom, many companies have been disappointed in the results. The problem is that those scientists are trained to ask smart questions, wrangle the relevant data, and uncover insights--but not to communicate what those insights mean for the business. To be successful, the author writes, a data science team needs six talents: project management, data wrangling, data analysis, subject expertise, design, and storytelling. He outlines four steps for achieving that success: (1) Define talents, not team members. (2) Hire to create a portfolio of necessary talents. (3) Expose team members to talents they don't have. (4)  Structure projects around talents.

Research shows that leaders consistently rate their own meetings very favorably--and much more positively than attendees do. When managers assume that their meetings are going well, they are less apt to solicit feedback and seek opportunities to improve. As a result, frustrations that attendees commonly cite (such as irrelevant agenda items, overly long duration, lack of focus) persist, leaving people disgruntled and disengaged. This article helps managers learn to diagnose their meeting problems, better prepare for and facilitate the gatherings they lead, and seek feedback to further hone their skills.

The Hollywood superagent turned Silicon Valley adviser discusses winning over clients and building creative teams.

The author-the Chief Economist at the Creative Destruction Lab-argues that recent developments in artificial intelligence constitute advances in prediction. Prediction occurs when you use information that you have to produce information that you do not have. In a wide-ranging interview, he says that importantly, this is all machine learning does. It cannot establish causal relationships and therefore it must be used with care in the face of uncertainty and limited data. As a result, he explains why workers will be making more complex decisions going forward, and why there will always be a role for human judgment in every organization.

If you trace the origin of any creative breakthrough, it is possible to find the point where someone changed the question. The author-who co-wrote The Innovator's DNA with Clayton Christensen-shows that questions can do amazing things: Knock down the walls that have been constraining your thinking; remove one or more of the 'givens' in a line of thinking; and open up space for inquiry that had been closed off by narrow framing. He provides a three-step framework for asking better questions and re-framing issues, showing that if you can properly phrase a question, the answer is the easy part.

Most of the big car manufacturers now have an automatic vehicle ('AV') division and expect to make the technology available to the mass market as early as 2025. And by the year 2045, AV market share is predicted to be as high as 87.2 per cent. The authors share findings from their study of 55 cities worldwide that are taking a holistic approach to implementing multifaceted AV policies-covering everything from traffic rules to land use, ride sharing and taxi reform. They describe the progress made to date and the key challenges that lie ahead as consumers, cities and regions embrace this disruptive technology.

The high degree of change in today's environment demands that organizations adapt their strategy to new situations much more frequently than ever before. Yet in a world of 'transient advantage', too many companies are obsessed with traditional industry analysis and continue to define their most important competitors as the other companies within their industry. In a wide-ranging interview, the author shows that this is a very dangerous way to think about competition right now. In more and more markets, we are seeing industries competing with other industries, business models competing with other business models - even within the same industry - and entirely new categories emerging. She describes the new mindset required to thrive in an age of transient advantage, explaining the roles of 'continuous reconfiguration', healthy disengagement and more.

Managers often express a grave concern about how fast artificial intelligence is unfolding - so fast that they become afraid of committing to any one supplier or standard. But precisely because we are living in a world of accelerated change, it is critical to stay in the know. The author describes some of the key concepts that every manager should be familiar with in the 'second machine age'. In the end, he shows that companies can no longer claim conventional advantages by virtue of being 'vertically integrated'; instead, they will be under tremendous pressure to match smaller players that are able to deliver customized solutions in real time as orders are made. In other words, in the second machine age, big companies need to act small.

The most innovative organizations realize that the best strategy in the world will get you nowhere unless you relentlessly make it happen. They show that the relentless execution of innovation has five key characteristics: clarity, focus, commitment to change, acceptance of failure and close proximity to customers. In the end, they show that getting things done with a relentless can-do attitude demands a degree of bravery that few organizations demonstrate; and that, as indicated by the stories of Amazon, Netflix, Haier and many others, fortune truly does favour the brave.

It is widely accepted that creativity influences critical organizational outcomes. Yet many practitioners struggle to design work routines that foster creativity. In response to this 'knowledge gap', scholars have increasingly studied job design factors that enhance or hamper creativity. The authors focus on one under-explored job design factor that may influence creativity: task switching. They show that, by forcing individuals to temporarily put tasks aside, a 'continual-switch' approach elevates creative performance by alleviating the tendency to cognitively 'fixate' on ineffective ideas or problem-solving strategies.