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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Are You a Disruptor or a Destructor? A Complete Guide to Innovation for Today's Leaders

Entrepreneur - Innovation

Two sides to the innovation coin will make or break your business. Understand disruptive and destructive innovation before attempting to shake up the market.

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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 144
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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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The most important question in development

Christensen Institute

Who will fly, fix, and fund the helicopters? And why? One of the things that caught my eye in a February, 2023 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report was the change in helicopters for the Afghan army. The report noted that the Afghan Air Force (AAF) was “familiar with the Soviet-made Mi-17 helicopter” and was “able to do most of the maintenance on those aircraft.

Report 124
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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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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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The Art of Leapfrogging across the Energy Transition.

Innovating4Energy

The art of leapfrogging accelerates the Energy Transition Any search for advantage or validation of making a change must consider the art of leapfrogging, especially in the Energy Transition we are all undergoing. Leapfrogging can accelerate the rapid and transformative progress toward a more sustainable and efficient energy ecosystem that provides advantage and customer identification.

Policies 122
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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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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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Delivering Negative Feedback

Michael Roberto

Source: Getty Images In a recent article for Kellogg Insight , Professor Brooke Vuckovic offered some great tips on how to deliver negative feedback effectively. Among the bits of advice, Vuckovic recommended trying to anticipate the types of new information that might emerge and challenge one's beliefs about the drivers of poor performance: "To prepare for this possibility, she suggests asking yourself a few prompts: What’s your story of the problem—and what story might this other person tell a

Tips 62
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The power of ecosystem thinking for resolving the innovation complexity of today

Paul Hobcraft

Applying ecosystem thinking to innovate complex and challenging problems “Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect, it alters the way we will approach problems today and in the future, ecosystems offer a greater potential for collaborative growth, impact and sustaining innovating value” Our understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (ext

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The Man Who Invented a Technology Used Billions of Times a Day Doesn't Get Credit for It. Now He's Setting the Record Straight.

Entrepreneur - Innovation

Paul McEnroe, an award-winning engineer who spent more than two decades in leadership roles at IBM, opens up about the Universal Product Code's development and the misconception that persists.

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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 152
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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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Is global development anti-development?

Christensen Institute

On April 25 th , 2023, I had the opportunity to present some of our work on market-creating innovations in the halls of the United States Congress. I began my remarks by telling the following story I’d heard from a minister in an East African country. The minister explained that as the COVID-19 pandemic began, leaders in the country realized they didn’t have the capacity to make facemasks and other personal protective equipment (PPEs).

Policies 138
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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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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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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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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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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 230
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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 228
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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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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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2023: Making The Shift From Disruption To Resilience

Digital Tonto

It’s been roughly 25 years since Clayton Christensen inaugurated the disruptive era and what he initially intended to describe as a special case has been implemented as a general rule. Disruption is increasingly self-referential, used as both premise and conclusion, while the status quo is assumed to be inadequate as an a priori principle. The results, by just about any metric imaginable, have been tragic.

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Values Always Cost You Something. That’s What Makes Them Different From Platitudes.

Digital Tonto

Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

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3 Reasons Why Change Fails

Digital Tonto

People like to quote the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said things like “the only constant is change” and “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” They’re clever quotes and they give us confidence that the change we seek is not only possible, but inevitable. Yet while change in general may be inevitable, the prospects for any particular change initiative are decidedly poor and the failure to recognize that simple fact is why

Change 222
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Don’t Try To Shape Opinions, Shape Networks

Digital Tonto

The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it and so the best way to drive change forward is to explain the need for change in a convincing and persuasive way. Change, in this view, is essentially a communication exercise and the right combination of words and images is all that is required. Even assuming that it is practical to convince people that way, by the same logic they can just as easily have their mind changed right back by counter-argume

Tips 220
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How Embedded Analytics Gets You to Market Faster with a SAAS Offering

Start-ups & SMBs launching products quickly must bundle dashboards, reports, & self-service analytics into apps. Customers expect rapid value from your product (time-to-value), data security, and access to advanced capabilities. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools can provide valuable data analysis capabilities, but they have a barrier to entry that can stop small and midsize businesses from capitalizing on them.

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We Expect Humans To Be Accountable. We Should Expect No Less Of AI

Digital Tonto

In 2020, Ofqual, the authority that administers A-Level college entrance exams in the UK, found itself mired in scandal. Unable to hold live exams because of Covid-19, it designed and employed an algorithm that based scores partly on the historical performance of the schools students attended with the unintended consequence that already disadvantaged students found themselves further penalized by artificially deflated scores.

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The Great Digital Reckoning Is Near

Digital Tonto

Clearly, there is something afoot in Silicon Valley. The technology is maturing, the scandals keep getting bigger and, with information and communication technologies representing a mere 6% of advanced economies, we still have yet to see anything approaching the impact of earlier technology revolutions. Make no mistake, a reckoning is fast approaching.

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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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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 143
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How Retailers Are Transforming Customer Experiences with Data & AI

Speaker: David Azoulay, Marc Stracuzza, Román Tejada, and Guest Speaker Sucharita Kodali

Imagine a retail landscape where every interaction is personalized, every decision informed, and every opportunity maximized 🤔✨ Join us for an exploratory journey into the heart of AI-driven retail innovation. We’ll unveil the transformative potential of AI and data analytics in shaping the future of omnichannel personalization and e-commerce.