2023

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53 Questions Developers Should Ask Innovators

TechEmpower Innovation

At TechEmpower, we frequently talk to startup founders, CEOs, product leaders, and other innovators about their next big tech initiative. It’s part of our job to ask questions about their plans, challenge their assumptions, and suggest paths to success. The conversations are interesting and varied because they’re about new, exciting, different things.

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The needs of Innovation Coherence

Paul Hobcraft

The needs of Innovation Coherence. Innovation often fails to align with strategic needs. It is a known, well-discussed fact. This is often not the fault of the innovator but the very people designing but not sharing the strategy or failing to recognize all the implications this might mean in shifting resources, investing money or simply under-appreciating the complexities that often lie with innovation to conceive, validate, contribute and deliver the contributions into that strategy.

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Leading Change May Need to Begin with Changing Yourself

Harvard Business Review

Behavior change is hard, but it’s a skill leaders who want to succeed amid near-constant organizational change need to develop. By increasing their self-awareness, committing to change, overcoming limiting thoughts, and deliberately practicing new behaviors, leaders raise the likelihood that the change initiatives they’re tasked to lead will be successful.

Change 145
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Why Your Startup Needs a Fractional CTO – TechEmpower

TechEmpower Innovation

A Fractional CTO bridges the gap between founders and developers to help keep your tech strategy aligned with your business goals. This helps your startup stay agile and competitive in a fast-paced marketplace.

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Navigating the Future: Generative AI, Application Analytics, and Data

Generative AI is upending the way product developers & end-users alike are interacting with data. Despite the potential of AI, many are left with questions about the future of product development: How will AI impact my business and contribute to its success? What can product managers and developers expect in the future with the widespread adoption of AI?

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We Need To Stop Worshiping Algorithms

Digital Tonto

Humans can be irrational and maddening. Decades of research have shown that, when given the exact same set of facts, even experts will make very different assessments. Some people will be more strict, others more lenient. Some of us are naturally optimistic, others are cynics. A family squabble in the morning can affect the choices we make all day. So it’s not unreasonable to want to improve quality and reduce variance in our decision making by taking a more algorithmic approach by offering clea

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ChatGPT on Business Innovation Ecosystems

Ecosystems4Innovating

Discussing with ChatGPT about Business Innovation Ecosystems, their value and progress

ChatGPT 237

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Jimmy Buffett: Innovator Of Happiness

Bill Fischer

Innovation was never as much fun as when Jimmy Buffett was involved. His message of engagement, and business models to deliver it, were always a winner; happiness sells!

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Shifting the conversation from poverty alleviation to prosperity creation

Christensen Institute

In the recently published report , Scenarios for Future Global Growth, Charles Kenny and Zack Gehan forecast how the global economy will evolve by 2050. There’s good and bad news. The good news is that, by their estimates, no country will be classified as low-income (currently defined as having a Gross National Income per capita of $1,085 or less) by 2050.

Report 137
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Understanding the Limitations of AI

Faisal Hoque

Panaceas are hard to come by. And artificial intelligence (AI) is certainly no exception.

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23 Experts Predict What’s the Most Exciting AI Trend in 2023

Acuvate

The future of Artificial Intelligence is a hotly debated topic, with countless predictions and speculations about its potential impact. With the rise of Generative AI and Adaptive AI, the field is rapidly evolving and advancing. At Acuvate, we have been using AI to revolutionize business processes. To gain a deeper understanding of what’s to come, we asked 20 of the top AI specialists globally this question: ‘What is your prediction for the materialization of AI in 2023?

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Turn Payments Into Personalization: Unlock the Value of Transaction Data

Speaker: Loreal Lynch, Everett Zufelt, and Michaela Weber

Once upon a time, in the vast realm of online commerce, there lived a humble checkout button overlooked by many. Yet, within its humble click lay the power to transform a mere visitor into a loyal customer. 🧐 💡 Getting checkout right can mark the difference between a successful sale and an abandoned cart, yet many businesses fail to make payments a part of their commerce strategy even when it has a direct impact on revenue.

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How Empathy Can Be Your Secret Weapon

Digital Tonto

Empathy, as powerful as it can potentially be, is widely misunderstood. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective, but the one-dimensional use of the term is misleading and limits its value. When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, empathy can seem like a “nice to have,” trait rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage.

Culture 234
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What Will Humans Do In An Artificially Intelligent World?

Digital Tonto

In his story The Library of Babel, Borges describes a library which contains books with all potential word combinations in all possible languages. Such a place would encompass all possible knowledge, but would also be completely useless, because the vast majority of books would be gibberish consisting of random strings of symbols. In essence, deriving meaning would be an exercise in curation, which machines could do if they perfectly understood our intentions.

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We Need To Stop Fooling Ourselves And Get Our Facts Straight. That Takes Work.

Digital Tonto

In one of my favorite essays the physicist Richard Feynman wrote “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” He goes on further to say that simply being honest isn’t enough, you also need to “bend over backwards” to provide information so that others may prove you wrong.

Data 229
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Don’t Trust Your Feelings. They’re Often Triggers That Mislead You

Digital Tonto

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains aren’t aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, had similar findings. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened.

Training 227
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Manufacturing Sustainability Surge: Your Guide to Data-Driven Energy Optimization & Decarbonization

Speaker: Kevin Kai Wong, President of Emergent Energy Solutions

In today's industrial landscape, the pursuit of sustainable energy optimization and decarbonization has become paramount. Manufacturing corporations across the U.S. are facing the urgent need to align with decarbonization goals while enhancing efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, the lack of comprehensive energy data poses a significant challenge for manufacturing managers striving to meet their targets.

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Why Is There So Much B t?

Digital Tonto

Pretty much everywhere you look, you’ll find b t. We are constantly bombarded with politicians and “experts “on TV, at conferences and on social media, spouting b t. An economist would tell you that it is simply impossible for so much b t to exist, because the market values truth, but of course that’s b t. One possible reason that there is so much b t in the world is that there are so many b *s.

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You Need More Than Data to Understand Your Customers

Harvard Business Review

Today we have more data than ever before, yet marketers still struggle to understand their customers. That’s because today’s marketers have mistaken information for intimacy. The author, who ran strategy for Wieden+Kennedy, describes an ethnographic research campaign his team conducted on behalf of McDonald’s. They produced a cultural bible of sorts that chronicled a series of beliefs, artifacts, behavioral rituals, and language that constitute the McDonald’s fandom.

Data 157
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8 Essential Qualities of Successful Leaders

Harvard Business Review

Becoming a great leader is a journey of continuous learning and growth. It’s a process — one that thrives on embracing challenges, seeking feedback, fostering connections, and cultivating understanding. In this article, the author outlines the eight most essential leadership qualities, according to Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, one of the world’s top experts on leadership.

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How to Get the Honest Input You Need from Your Employees

Harvard Business Review

Leaders often struggle to get complete, unfiltered information from the people around them. This wealth of unspoken information represents a great untapped resource for today’s leaders, and yet most remain at a loss for how to reliably access it. Common tactics for overcoming this problem, such as taking another’s perspective or reading their body language, simply aren’t sufficient.

How To 143
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Peak Performance: Continuous Testing & Evaluation of LLM-Based Applications

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

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Our Favorite Management Tips of 2023

Harvard Business Review

Our Management Tip of the Day newsletter continues to be one of HBR’s most popular newsletters. In this article, we list 10 of our favorites from 2023 — covering topics like how to get your mojo back if you’re feeling disengaged at work, questions to ask your boss in your next check-in, talking to your team about using AI, giving hard feedback, speaking with confidence when you’re put on the spot — and more.

Tips 142
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3 Traps to Avoid When Executing Your Strategy

Harvard Business Review

When executing strategy, companies typically fall into one or more of three traps: 1) They let too many people weigh in; 2)They plan a lot of activity but do not specify concrete actions; and 3) They tend not to build in accountability into execution. The result is that. lot a good strategies never take off. This article offers pointers on how to avoid the three traps.

Strategy 143
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The Rise of the Meta City

Harvard Business Review

New York and Miami, Dubai and Cairo, the Bay Area and Austin. Pandemic-era migrations have created strong new connections between cities — and companies need to update their location strategy to keep up.

Strategy 143
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Charting the Emerging Geography of AI

Harvard Business Review

As the AI power centers emerge and shift around the world, they will shape which AI applications are prioritized, which societies and sectors of the economy get the most benefits, what data are used to train algorithms, and which biases get included and which get neutralized — and how we balance accelerating AI innovation against building in safeguards.

Training 143
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How Mature Companies Are Scaling Transformational New Businesses

Scaling transformational innovations in large companies is challenging due to ‘Company Fit’ issues, which arise when the resources, processes, and priorities (RPPs) of the core business are not aligned with the needs of the new business. Many companies have learned how ambidexterity—the ability to both ‘exploit the present and explore the future,’ can help them address these issues for ideation and incubation of new innovations, but scaling transformative business innovations remains a challenge

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5 Tactics to Combat a Culture of False Urgency at Work

Harvard Business Review

The headwinds of false urgency can be intense. But they also foster a reactive culture. If everything is urgent, there’s little opportunity for creative and deep work, which tends to flourish only when there’s time and space. In this article, the author offers tips that will help you focus on what’s truly urgent in your organization and enable your team to deliver strong results and sustain high performance over time.

Culture 144
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How Leaders Can Create a Purpose-Driven Culture

Harvard Business Review

Companies are increasingly emphasizing a corporate purpose beyond mere profitability. The success of this integration largely hinges on organizational culture. Leaders, spanning all tiers, need to genuinely exemplify and articulate the company’s values, as demonstrated by companies like Netflix and LUSH. It’s vital for employees to perceive their daily roles as contributing to this larger purpose, with firms like Atlassian and Cisco offering noteworthy models.

Culture 143
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10 Ways to Prove You’re a Strategic Thinker

Harvard Business Review

To get ahead in the business world, it’s not enough to think stategically. You also have to effectively communicate those ideas. There are several ways to do this, including elevating the conversation to focus on the big picture and broader context, being forward-looking in your comments, anticipating the effects of potential decisions, connecting disparate concepts, simplifying complex issues, using metaphors and analogies, stimultating dialogue with questions, showing you are informed, activel

Strategy 144
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Help Your Employees Develop the Skills They Really Need

Harvard Business Review

The future of work will not be determined by technology, but by creating the right mix of education, exposure, and experience needed to develop skills and put them to work, creating a vastly more productive workplace and economy. In this article, the authors recommend a “70/20/10” learning model, in which only 10% of learning comes from formal instruction (education), 20% from social learning or mentorship (exposure), and 70% from hands-on, experiential practice with feedback (experience).

Learning 145
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How Automation is Driving Efficiency Through the Last Mile of Reporting

Speaker: Jamie Eagan

As organizations strive for agility and efficiency, it's imperative for finance leaders to embrace innovative technologies and redefine traditional processes. Join us as we explore the pivotal role of digitalization and automation in reshaping what is commonly referred to as the “last mile of reporting”. We’ll deep-dive into why digitalization is no longer a choice, but a necessity for finance departments to stay competitive in a fast-paced environment touching on: 2024 trends for the Office of

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How to Create Your Own “Year in Review”

Harvard Business Review

While the reality of work can feel especially overwhelming at the end of the year, reflection is the key to doing things differently in the year to come. Taking the time to pause and review your year increases your self-awareness and provides insights to improve. The authors present three steps to conduct your own learning “year in review.

How To 141
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5 Ways to Develop Talent for an Unpredictable Future

Harvard Business Review

We may not know what tomorrow’s jobs will look like, but we can safely assume that when people are more curious, emotionally intelligent, resilient, driven, and intelligent, they will generally be better equipped to learn what is needed to perform those jobs, and provide whatever human value technology cannot replace. Rather than betting on specialists or forcing people into specific niches, organizations need to focus on expanding people’s talents.

Learning 144
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How to Tell an Employee They’re Not Ready for a Promotion

Harvard Business Review

Discussing a promotion with an employee when you’re not ready to give them one is a delicate balancing act, but it’s also a golden opportunity. It’s a chance to turn a potentially negative situation into a constructive, forward-looking dialogue. By approaching the conversation with empathy, support, and a focus on the future, you set the stage for a collaborative relationship with your employee.

How To 141
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How to Evaluate a Job Candidate’s Critical Thinking Skills in an Interview

Harvard Business Review

The oldest and still the most powerful tactic for fostering critical thinking is the Socratic method, developed over 2,400 years ago by Socrates, one of the founders of Western philosophy. The Socratic method uses thought-provoking question-and-answer probing to promote learning. It focuses on generating more questions than answers, where the answers are not a stopping point but the beginning of further analysis.

Analysis 145
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From Whims to Wins: How a Customer-Centric Portfolio Transforms Product Strategy

Speaker: John Mansour - President, Product Management University

You know that sinking feeling. You’ve come up with a winning product strategy, everyone’s on board and energized, and you’re halfway down the path to execution only to have it submarined by something someone convinced your leadership was more strategic! It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar, and it exemplifies one of the biggest struggles with individual product strategies.