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• Article | MIT Sloan Management Review | Spring 2020

  From Disruption to Collision: The New Competitive Dynamics

  Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani

  Citation:

  Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "From Disruption to Collision: The New Competitive Dynamics." Special Issue on Disruption 2020. MIT Sloan Management Review 61, no. 3 (Spring 2020).  View Details

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• 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.

  Keywords: artificial intelligence; design thinking; Technological Innovation; Design; Change; Theory;

  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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• Article | Harvard Business Review | January–February 2020

  Competing in the Age of AI

  Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani

  Today’s markets are being reshaped by a new kind of firm—one in which artificial intelligence (AI) runs the show. This cohort includes giants like Google, Facebook, and Alibaba, and growing businesses such as Wayfair and Ocado. Every time we use their services, the same thing happens: Rather than relying on processes run by employees, the value we get is delivered by algorithms. Software is at the core of the enterprise, and humans are moved off to the side. This model frees firms from traditional operating constraints and enables them to compete in unprecedented ways. AI-driven processes can be scaled up very rapidly, allow for greater scope because they can be connected to many kinds of businesses, and offer very powerful opportunities for learning and improvement. And while the value of scale eventually begins to level off in traditional models, in AI-based ones, it never stops climbing. All of that allows AI-driven firms to quickly overtake traditional ones. As AI models blur the lines between industries, strategies are relying less on specialized expertise and differentiation based on cost, quality, and branding and more on business network position, unique data, and the deployment of sophisticated analytics.

  Keywords: artificial intelligence; algorithms; Technological Innovation; Business Model; Competition; Competitive Strategy;

  Citation:

  Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Competing in the Age of AI." Harvard Business Review 98, no. 1 (January–February 2020): 60–67.  View Details

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