The case for digital reinvention | McKinsey & Company

This finding confirms what many executives may already suspect: by reducing economic friction, digitization enables competition that pressures revenue and profit growth. Current levels of digitization have already taken out, on average, up to six points of annual revenue and 4.5 points of growth in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). And there’s more pressure ahead, our research suggests, as digital penetration deepens.

Source: The case for digital reinvention | McKinsey & Company

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How the API economy is igniting a cultural shift in businesses | CIO

It’s clear the big no longer eat the small; the fast eat the slow. Speed is one of the single most important characteristics that determine a company’s success today. It’s critical for bringing new products to market, establishing new global presences, changing existing processes and onboarding new partners—all faster than competition.

Source: How the API economy is igniting a cultural shift in businesses | CIO

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25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do | Harvard Business Review

Like President Johnson in the 1960s, we see that automation could make a major contribution to productivity and prosperity… For companies around the world, automation will offer the potential to capture substantial value — and not just from labor substitution. These technologies enable higher throughput, enhanced quality, better outcomes, greater safety, and the opportunity to scale up or adopt new business models.

Source: 25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do

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IBM Watson Health: Cognitive healthcare outthinks data overload

A single patient’s electronic medical record (EMR) may contain over 100MB of complex and disparate data, and much of it is unstructured, such as text notes. That’s a lot to go through in one doctor’s visit. As part of IBM’s research with Cleveland Clinic, clinicians are working with Watson to explore how to navigate and process EMRs to unlock hidden insights within the data, with the goal of helping clinicians make more informed and accurate decisions about patient care. By comparing EMRs, recent diagnostic findings and medical history, and cross-referencing them with thousands of medical journals, Watson can begin to offer clinicians the benefit of more data, more time to plan the best treatments and more time to spend on patient care.

Source: IBM Watson Health: Welcome to the New Era of Cognitive Healthcare

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Cognitive finance outthinks volatility.

A fin tech start-up, Alpha Modus, is already changing the way investment managers manage funds with cognitive technology. By working with Watson, they’re able to build investment tools that can understand and analyse not just organised data, like stock tickers, but also invisible, unstructured data like tweets, news articles and CEO webcasts—improving their predictive accuracy using imbalances by over 500%.

Alpha Modus’s work to save investors from a price-gouging industry is just beginning. On November 9th they will host AlphaHack, a hackathon in New York City in conjunction with IBM Bluemix, where developers will take their own crack at developing innovative investment applications. With this combination of talent and tools, traditional investment models are in for a shake-up. True to its name, Alpha Modus is delivering alpha where it belongs, in the hands of investors.

Source: Alpha Modus reinvents investment with IBM Bluemix

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Why Innovators Should Study the Rise and Fall of the Venetian Empire

Entrepreneurs and innovators resist “success as usual” syndrome, exploring emerging technologies and new business models. They try to keep the big picture in mind and are wary of being too efficient and too optimized. This perspective helps them promote unconventional ways of thinking, solving problems, and challenging the status quo. They know the goal is not to chase a fixed horizon but to understand when and how the horizon moves as they approach it.

Source: Why Innovators Should Study the Rise and Fall of the Venetian Empire

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Do Things that Don’t Scale

If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users’ problems in a way that wasn’t yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems.

Source: Do Things that Don’t Scale

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