Staples (C)

Myra M. Hart; Marco   Iansiti; Barbara  Feinberg

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 1998 (Revised March 1998)

Staples (C)

by Myra M. Hart, Marco Iansiti and Barbara Feinberg

Abstract

The search for appropriate hardware and software to support the launch of a new large-scale retail operation forces the management team to define their goals at a very detailed level and to make all underlying assumptions explicit.

Keywords: Goals and Objectives; Hardware; Software; Business Startups; Management Teams; Retail Industry;

Format: Print

16 pages

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Citation:

Hart, Myra M., Marco Iansiti, and Barbara Feinberg. "Staples (C)." Harvard Business School Case 898-159, January 1998. (Revised March 1998.)

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Roberto Verganti, Luca Vendraminelli and Marco Iansiti

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting the scenario in which innovation takes place. What are the implications for our understanding of design? Is AI just another digital technology that, akin to many others, will not significantly question what we know about design? Or will it create transformations in design that our current frameworks cannot capture? To address these questions, we have investigated two pioneering cases at the frontier of AI, Netflix and AirBnB (complemented with analyses in Microsoft and Tesla), which offer a privileged window on the future evolution of design. We found that AI does not undermine the basic principles of Design Thinking (people-centered, abductive and iterative). Rather, it enables to overcome past limitations (in scale, scope and learning) of human-intense design processes. In the context of AI factories solutions may even be more user-centered (to an extreme level of granularity, i.e. being designed for every single person), more creative, and continuously updated through learning iterations that span the entire life cycle of a product. Yet, we found that AI profoundly changes the practice of design. Problem solving tasks, traditionally carried on by designers, are now automated into learning loops that operate without limitations of volume and speed. These loops think in a radically different way than a designer: they address complex problems through very simple tasks, iterated exponentially. The article therefore proposes a new framework for understanding design practice in the age of AI. We also discuss the implications for design and innovation theory. Specifically, we observe that, as creative problem solving is significantly conducted by algorithms, human design increasingly becomes an activity of sense making, i.e. to understand which problems make sense to be addressed. This shift in focus calls for new theories and brings design closer to leadership, which is, inherently, an activity of sense making.

Citation:

Verganti, Roberto, Luca Vendraminelli, and Marco Iansiti. "Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-091, February 2020. View Details

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Indigo Agriculture used a digital-enabled research and development (R&D) process to launch its initial product, microbial coatings for agricultural seeds, which increase crop yields while reducing the need for fertilizers. In doing so, the company developed direct relationships with farmers, in contrast to typical agricultural supply chains that use intermediaries. The company then launched a marketplace platform to link growers directly to crop buyers, again disintermediating the market. Indigo Agriculture is now considering launching an initiative to incentivize farmers to engage in regenerative agricultural practices by setting up a carbon market that could pay them for sequestering carbon into their soils. If scaled globally, the idea could sequester as much as one trillion tons (a teraton) of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere into agricultural soils, but pursing the idea has many risks.

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Staples (C)

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Staples (C)

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