Conference Details - Agenda

Fueled by technological advances such as mobility, AI, social media, and IoT, companies in every industry are charting their paths into the digital economy. Yet some firms are far outpacing others in their ability to drive strategic value from digital innovation. Why is this? Drawing from his award-winning book, Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation, George will describe the capabilities required to drive digital transformation in customer engagement, operations, and business models. These capabilities will be essential to help companies in every industry to succeed in the fast-moving digital economy.

The World Wide Web has given rise to new business models, such as Google, Facebook and Uber, but has also created cyber-security problems because of its inherent “trust” model. Many researchers believe we need to “rewire” the web to remove our reliance on centralized, trusted third parties. As demonstrated by BitCoin, using BlockChain, very different architectures are possible. This talk will review how Web 1.0 was architected and then discuss how other architectures, such as those used by BitTorrent, GitHub,  BlockChain and the Inter-Planetary File System can solve many of the problems but not perhaps all.

What if innovation wasn’t just about searching for the idea? What if innovation was just the outcome, neither a process nor a product? What if innovating was a skill you can practice and get better at?

Innovating can be about something other than making an idea look disruptive, earth-shattering, or exponential before you even start. You can aim for meaningful impact, you can solve real world problems. Entrepreneurship is about creating new companies, innovating is about solving real world problems and progress. Being more entrepreneurial is not how you get to innovate.

Come join the conversation about how you start innovating and set yourself or your organization to do it continually. We’ll discuss innovating as a way to discover a path to scale for any idea; it starts with what you have; it is for corporations and non-profits as well as for entrepreneurs. Innovating by making real world problems tangible offers an alternative to “entrepreneurial” recipes and beliefs that would have you stress over coming up with “the perfect idea,” and direct your attention toward marketing an idea instead of figuring out how to evolve that idea to market. You get to learn by being productively wrong, no need to embrace failure in your culture. We’ll conclude with an overview of how to set up innovating as a continuous practice inside existing organizations.

Bitcoin became a buzzword overnight. It pops up in headlines and fuels endless media debate. Cryptocurrency and the “blockchain” technology behind it holds the promise of a financial system without middlemen—it could put that system in the control of the people who use it and safeguard them from a 2008-type crash. More than a digital form of currency, this technology could integrate billions of hitherto excluded people into the global economy, restore individuals’ control over their private data and identities, and change the way organizations and business relationships are governed.

Rapid urbanization and increasing population density in megacities poses unique challenges for last-mile distribution in many of the world’s largest emerging markets. Meeting these challenges requires understanding shifting consumer expectations and the evolution of omni-channel retail and delivery in city environments. These insights can help companies leverage logistics big data analytics for last-mile network design and planning to reach customers on their own terms, where they live, work, shop, or play, anywhere on the globe.

Empowered by ubiquitous information technology, the generation that has come of age in the digital era has learned a very different consumer experience than their parents. From media and financial services to hospitality and transportation, Millennials expect flexibility and responsiveness across sectors to customize their transactions to fit their needs as individuals. Those expectations may only grow as the exchange of data between consumers and sellers continues expanding, fostering even greater personalization through the emergence of bioproducts.

Retailers know it is crucial to optimize the timing and promotion of sales to maximize profit. But how do you process the large amounts of data necessary to determine optimal pricing and timing? Left to the intuition of product managers, retailers risk missing out, but a new method created by Georgia Perakis and her team of PhD students in collaboration with Oracle RGBU, aims to change that. Using models that analyze price effects, promotion effects, and general consumer behavior data, this approach has the potential to help retailers increase their profits by an average of 3-10 percent. In a world of slim profit margins and ever-increasing competition, this could be a game changer for retailers in any industry.