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Why "Break Technologies" Will Change Your Business

Harvard Business Review

One way to do this is to look for "break technologies.". If you are at all familiar with Michael Porter's work , think about this as an industry developing its value chain. In the 1990's, cellular technology eliminated the usefulness of physical phone lines in the telephone value chain.

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The Commoditization of Scale

Harvard Business Review

To understand my point, let's think about how big companies have developed scale advantages through information systems. Consider Porter's value chain. Despite this modularization, managers still relied on one support system to unify a set of seemingly smaller value chains; information. Develop a vision of the future.

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What We Know, Now, About the Internet’s Disruptive Power

Harvard Business Review

That wasn’t as magical as it might seem, he argued in the 1979 piece, since the required technologies already existed in some form or other. Then last year Michael Porter returned to apply the five forces framework to the next phase of the digital economy – the internet of things. It’s still worth a look now.

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Secure Your Flanks, Protect Your Business

Harvard Business Review

When Netscape Navigator imagined the disruption of Microsoft Windows, it forgot that its web browser was an add-on on the operating system. Eventually Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and outflanked it by eliminating the market for a paid browser. Eventually, some incumbents adapted and invested in technology as well.

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That Mad Men Computer, Explained by HBR in 1969

Harvard Business Review

It’s 1969 on this season’s Mad Men, and a glass-enclosed climate-controlled room is being built to house Sterling Cooper’s first computer — a soon-to-be-iconic IBM System/360 – in the space where the copywriters used to meet. Technology' How Data Visualization Answered One of Retail’s Most Vexing Questions.

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Social Progress = Economic Success: Social Innovation at Work

Harvard Business Review

This cover story, by Michael Porter, suggests that companies and government need to get outside an outdated approach to value creation. Today, Porter says, companies must reconnect company success with social progress, not as philanthropy, but as a way to achieve economic success. trillion by 2020.

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Can Insurance Companies Incentivize Their Customers to Be Healthier?

Harvard Business Review

Insurance is therefore a natural shared value industry — one that can employ the idea proposed by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and Mark Kramer of FSG in 2011. Consider the Vitality program developed by the South African insurance company Discovery over 25 years ago.