The Truth about Blockchain

Marco   Iansiti; Karim R. Lakhani

Article | Harvard Business Review | January–February 2017

The Truth about Blockchain

Abstract

Contracts, transactions, and records of them provide critical structure in our economic system, but they haven’t kept up with the world’s digital transformation. They’re like rush-hour gridlock trapping a Formula 1 race car. Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology behind bitcoin, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions safely, permanently and very efficiently. For instance, while the transfer of a share of stock can now take up to a week, with blockchain it could happen in seconds. Blockchain could slash the cost of transactions and eliminate intermediaries like lawyers and bankers, and that could transform the economy. But, like the adoption of more Internet technologies, blockchain’s adoption will require broad coordination and will take years. The authors describe the path that blockchain is likely to follow and explain how firms should think about investments in it.

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Technology Adoption; Information Management; Information Technology Industry;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "The Truth about Blockchain." Harvard Business Review 95, no. 1 (January–February 2017): 118–127.

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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