Week 1: what is digital business and does it really matter?
- Digital business is defined as doing business more efficiently and effectively via
innovative use of digital technologies across different sectors and domains.
- Digital transformation
- The transformation of existing organizations
- Digital innovation
- The creation of new ventures for the digital age
- Digital disruption and the emergence of new ways of working(and living)
- Does it really matter?
- It is difficult for any business to avoid
- It affects nearly every organization and individual and has already distructed
many industries such as the newspaper industry
- The pace of change is accelerating
Removal of traditional constraints
- Digital natives compete simultaneously in multiple sectors and geographies, disrupting a
host of industries via platforms and rapidly expanding ecosystems
- Incumbents use new digital capabilities to transform strategies and business models to
address existential threats and pursue new opportunities
- Industries are on average less than 40% digitised
- As digitisation continues to gather pace, more pervasive and radical disruptions are
inevitable
The “Why”- are all these necessary?
- What are the intellectual arguments?
- Numerous explanations for the current innovation, transformation, disruption
- Fundamental changes
- Driving forces
- Facilitating factors
- Two fundamental changes in our society
- The continuous, exponential development of digital technologies- the ICTs
Revolution
- The information economy particularly the digital, digitizing or digitalised economy
- The transition of our economy and society
- Implications for businesses, governments, society, communities and individuals
- Implications for theory,practice, method, and policy
- Ex: Uber vs Taxis
Business implications
- The most crucial and critical resource for our economy has changed
information(knowledge, intelligence, insights, intangible and with special charactersitics)
crucial for value creation, distribution and capture.
- Our ability to capture, store, retrieve, communicate, analyze and use the most crucial
resource of our economy has been growing exponentially(digital technologies,
infrastructures and services).
- Fundamental rethink of the way business is conducted
What does this mean for business leaders?
, - Re-evaluate, question, challenge everything
- See if theory, methods, techniques are still applicable or relevant
- New strategies, business models, organizational designs and inter-organizational
relations
- New forms of work organization and new ways of working
- New management techniques and methods
- New business environment and new ecosystems
- New missions and purposes for organizations and for work
- Fundamental re-evaluation of Strategic Management, OM, Marketing , SCM, HRM
- Changing rules of the game
Week 2: The new digital environment
- Data has become “the oil” of the digital economy(Wedel and Kannan,2016)
Driving forces versus facilitating factors
- What factors are driving fundamental changs in the way business is conducted?
- What factors are primarily contextual, which facilitate or restrict the wat business is
conducted?
- Means and Ends
The Digital Economy
- How digital technologies are facilitating the changing patterns of production and
consumption
- The definition of the concept has evolved considerably over the past few decades
- The information/knowledge economy (from the 1960s to the 1990s)
- Information, both as commodity and resource, become “strategic
resource”
- Information content in all economic activities and sectors
- Information labour as a proportion of the overall workforce
- The digital economy(since the 1990s)
Intangible assets
- The total value of a company compare with the value of its tangible asset
- Employee’s skills, ICTs systems and organizational culture and company brands are
worth for more to many companies than their tangible assets
- Intangibles are hard for competitors to imitate(potentail sustainable advantage)
- Intangible assets worth different things to different people and organizations
- However, many existing management theories and techniques geared toward managing
tangible assets(full capacity utlisation)
, Key drivers of the digital economy
- Data, technology, platform, ecosystem
- Our growing ability to collect, store, retrieve, analyze and use massive amounts of
machine-readable information(digital data) about practically anything
- Data versus information (ex. Jack Ma of Alibaba)
- The continuous rapid growth of information/knowledge workers
Digital economy unevenly developed
- Between the developed and developing countries, the connected and unconnected, and
between genders and social classes
- Not as the traditional north-south divide
- Global digital innovations are led by USA and China
- USA and China control 90% of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms
- Europe’s share is only 4%
- Africa and Latin America together only 1%
The “Super Seven” or the “Big Nine”
- The global digital economy dominated by a handful of companies
- Seven “super platforms”
- Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba account for
two thirds of the total market value
- The “Big Nine”
- Additng IBM and Baidu to the list
- Each with over one (or several) billion users
The next wave
- The dominance of USA and China is likely to continue
- Significant lead in almost all promising technologies
- 75% of all patents related to blockchain technologies
- 50% of global spending on IoTs
- Their dominance in AI is equally overwhelming
- Rest of the world significantly trailing behind
The exponential growth of emerging digital technologies and their applications
- A long list and growing
- The future impact still uncertain
- Digital business is defined as doing business more efficiently and effectively via
innovative use of digital technologies across different sectors and domains.
- Digital transformation
- The transformation of existing organizations
- Digital innovation
- The creation of new ventures for the digital age
- Digital disruption and the emergence of new ways of working(and living)
- Does it really matter?
- It is difficult for any business to avoid
- It affects nearly every organization and individual and has already distructed
many industries such as the newspaper industry
- The pace of change is accelerating
Removal of traditional constraints
- Digital natives compete simultaneously in multiple sectors and geographies, disrupting a
host of industries via platforms and rapidly expanding ecosystems
- Incumbents use new digital capabilities to transform strategies and business models to
address existential threats and pursue new opportunities
- Industries are on average less than 40% digitised
- As digitisation continues to gather pace, more pervasive and radical disruptions are
inevitable
The “Why”- are all these necessary?
- What are the intellectual arguments?
- Numerous explanations for the current innovation, transformation, disruption
- Fundamental changes
- Driving forces
- Facilitating factors
- Two fundamental changes in our society
- The continuous, exponential development of digital technologies- the ICTs
Revolution
- The information economy particularly the digital, digitizing or digitalised economy
- The transition of our economy and society
- Implications for businesses, governments, society, communities and individuals
- Implications for theory,practice, method, and policy
- Ex: Uber vs Taxis
Business implications
- The most crucial and critical resource for our economy has changed
information(knowledge, intelligence, insights, intangible and with special charactersitics)
crucial for value creation, distribution and capture.
- Our ability to capture, store, retrieve, communicate, analyze and use the most crucial
resource of our economy has been growing exponentially(digital technologies,
infrastructures and services).
- Fundamental rethink of the way business is conducted
What does this mean for business leaders?
, - Re-evaluate, question, challenge everything
- See if theory, methods, techniques are still applicable or relevant
- New strategies, business models, organizational designs and inter-organizational
relations
- New forms of work organization and new ways of working
- New management techniques and methods
- New business environment and new ecosystems
- New missions and purposes for organizations and for work
- Fundamental re-evaluation of Strategic Management, OM, Marketing , SCM, HRM
- Changing rules of the game
Week 2: The new digital environment
- Data has become “the oil” of the digital economy(Wedel and Kannan,2016)
Driving forces versus facilitating factors
- What factors are driving fundamental changs in the way business is conducted?
- What factors are primarily contextual, which facilitate or restrict the wat business is
conducted?
- Means and Ends
The Digital Economy
- How digital technologies are facilitating the changing patterns of production and
consumption
- The definition of the concept has evolved considerably over the past few decades
- The information/knowledge economy (from the 1960s to the 1990s)
- Information, both as commodity and resource, become “strategic
resource”
- Information content in all economic activities and sectors
- Information labour as a proportion of the overall workforce
- The digital economy(since the 1990s)
Intangible assets
- The total value of a company compare with the value of its tangible asset
- Employee’s skills, ICTs systems and organizational culture and company brands are
worth for more to many companies than their tangible assets
- Intangibles are hard for competitors to imitate(potentail sustainable advantage)
- Intangible assets worth different things to different people and organizations
- However, many existing management theories and techniques geared toward managing
tangible assets(full capacity utlisation)
, Key drivers of the digital economy
- Data, technology, platform, ecosystem
- Our growing ability to collect, store, retrieve, analyze and use massive amounts of
machine-readable information(digital data) about practically anything
- Data versus information (ex. Jack Ma of Alibaba)
- The continuous rapid growth of information/knowledge workers
Digital economy unevenly developed
- Between the developed and developing countries, the connected and unconnected, and
between genders and social classes
- Not as the traditional north-south divide
- Global digital innovations are led by USA and China
- USA and China control 90% of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms
- Europe’s share is only 4%
- Africa and Latin America together only 1%
The “Super Seven” or the “Big Nine”
- The global digital economy dominated by a handful of companies
- Seven “super platforms”
- Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba account for
two thirds of the total market value
- The “Big Nine”
- Additng IBM and Baidu to the list
- Each with over one (or several) billion users
The next wave
- The dominance of USA and China is likely to continue
- Significant lead in almost all promising technologies
- 75% of all patents related to blockchain technologies
- 50% of global spending on IoTs
- Their dominance in AI is equally overwhelming
- Rest of the world significantly trailing behind
The exponential growth of emerging digital technologies and their applications
- A long list and growing
- The future impact still uncertain
