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Many CEOs Aren’t Breakthrough Innovators (and That’s OK)

Harvard Business Review

Innovation is widely regarded as important to long-term business performance. We’ve found that CEOs of big pharmaceutical companies, for example, are more likely to have a background as company lawyers, salespeople, or finance managers, than one in medicine or pharmaceutical R&D.

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How to Innovate When You're Not the Big Boss

Harvard Business Review

Given the unrelenting pace of change surrounding organizations in virtually every industry, companies are looking for executives who know how to innovate and introduce change, not simply caretakers who can manage the status quo. Senior management doesn't really encourage innovation, you'll hear. They won't let me take risks."

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Surefire Predictions and Why Doomsayers are Wrong

Harvard Business Review

Democracy will disappear as power shifts to developing countries with authoritarian regimes where no one cares about voice and participation. They assume that people are helpless victims of powerful forces beyond their control. For example, take these recent dire predictions: Machines will steal all the jobs. Youth violence will grow.

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Curiosity-Driven Data Science

Harvard Business Review

Data science can enable wholly new and innovative capabilities that can completely differentiate a company. But those innovative capabilities aren’t so much designed or envisioned as they are discovered and revealed through curiosity-driven tinkering by the data scientists. Sounds great, right?

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What Big Consumer Brands Can Do to Compete in a Digital Economy

Harvard Business Review

Newcomers like Harry’s still represent only a fraction of the overall market , but they’ve captured the majority of the growth in that time—a defining feature of disruptive innovation. By March 2016, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi had invested in some 55 startups, generating products from power banks to air purifiers.

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4 Models for Using AI to Make Decisions

Harvard Business Review

The most painful board conversations that I hear about machine learning revolve around how much power and authority super-smart software should have. The bad news: Petabytes of new data and algorithmic innovation assure that “autonomy creep” will relentlessly challenge human oversight from within. That’s hard.

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Surefire Predictions and Why Doomsayers are Wrong

Harvard Business Review

Democracy will disappear as power shifts to developing countries with authoritarian regimes where no one cares about voice and participation. They assume that people are helpless victims of powerful forces beyond their control. For example, take these recent dire predictions: Machines will steal all the jobs. Youth violence will grow.