Marco Iansiti

• Harvard University

The benefits to data analytics and machine learning have been distributed unevenly across firms around the world. Research on IT productivity points to intangible capital as a key driver of value creation from innovation in computing. We argue that a crucial component of intangible capital is organization-wide technological architecture, which is i...

Data is fundamental to machine learning-based products and services and is considered strategic due to its externalities for businesses, governments, non-profits, and more generally for society. It is renowned that the value of organizations (businesses, government agencies and programs, and even industries) scales with the volume of available data...

Managers often believe that collecting more data will continually improve the accuracy of their machine learning models. However, we argue in this paper that when data lose relevance over time, it may be optimal to collect a limited amount of recent data instead of keeping around an infinite supply of older (less relevant) data. In addition, we arg...

Digital technologies have led to the emergence of many platforms in our economy today. In certain platform networks, buyers in one market purchase services from providers in many other markets, whereas in others, buyers primarily purchase services from providers within the same market. Accordingly, network interconnectivity—which measures the degre...

Clayton Christensen's groundbreaking theory of “disruptive innovation” has proven to be one of the most influential management ideas of the last several decades. In this book, business and management experts—many of them Christensen's colleagues and former students—discuss the innovation challenges that lie ahead. Building on Christensen's work, th...

At the heart of any innovation process lies a fundamental practice: the way people create ideas and solve problems. This “decision making” side of innovation is what scholars and practitioners refer to as “design”. Decisions in innovation processes have so far been taken by humans. What happens when they can be substituted by machines? Artificial I...

In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, red...

The last few years, we have seen a rapid increase in the interest on “ecosystems”, “platforms”, and “industry architectures”. Motivated by changes in the nature of the competitive environment, regulatory and technological change, social scientists have sought to find new ways to describe the structure of the “aggregate” level that firms compete in,...

In this paper we find that advances in cloud computing likely will extend the IT induced economic growth in developed economies and foster growth in economies where IT penetration is not yet fully mature. We conclude that governments should work together to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

This paper examines the relative importance of platform quality, indirect network effects, and consumer expectations on the success of entrants in platform-based markets. We develop a theoretical model and find that an entrant's success depends on the strength of indirect network effects and on the consumers' discount factor for future applications...

In this paper we find that advances in cloud computing likely will extend the IT induced economic growth in developed economies and foster growth in economies where IT penetration is not yet fully mature. We conclude that governments should work together to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

Introduction and Overview All too often, practitioners, pundits, and academics take a pessimistic view of the value and longevity of today's technologies. We all fall in love with new, apparently “disruptive” technologies, like Linux or on-line music distribution, and preach the death of established organizations and existing capabilities. However,...

The advent and increasing use of free enterprise software presents new challenges and complexities in obtaining optimal governmental IT acquisitions. In this study, we consider the implications of pricing thresholds on government procurement processes in light of free software availability. We measure the prevalence of pricing thresholds in governm...

Many industries today behave like a massively interconnected network of organizations, technologies, consumers and products. Perhaps the most dramatic and widely known example is the computing industry. In contrast with the vertically integrated environment of the 1960s and 1970s, today’s industry is divided into a large

Ricoh, the Japanese copier manufacturer, is committed to reducing its environmental impact to one-eighth of its 2000 levels by 2050. It has already introduced three stages of environmental awareness to its operations, and its recycled copier business broke even in 2006. The company developed environmental accounting methods and produces annual envi...

Economic analysis often reviews the role of principles - such as respect for intellectual property rights - in driving innovation. Given the interdependent nature of innovation in information technology, three core principles have emerged that work together to ensure that complementary, interconnected products coexist and compete. These core princi...

Business ecosystems require careful orchestration and strategic choices regarding make/buy/partner decisions and membership access. This case examines the strategic and technological issues related to managing SAP's thriving ecosystem of user communities, software vendors, integration partners and technology providers. It details how the ecosystem...

Many studies highlight the challenges facing incumbent firms in responding effectively to major technological transitions. Though some authors argue that these challenges can be overcome by firms possessing what have been called dynamic capabilities, little work has described in detail the critical resources that these capabilities leverage or the...

This paper reports on the results of an empirical study of product development in a complex and novel environment. The work is based on field investigations of recent product development projects performed by all leading mainframe computer producers. The projects focused on the development of complex products based on advanced technologies and prob...

Researchers debate the role of installed base, platform quality and consumer expectations in driving the success of platforms. We analyze a dynamic model in which a new entrant with superior quality competes with an incumbent platform, and examine the long-run market outcomes. We find that the driver of market dynamics depends critically on the str...

Differing bases of competition in early and later stages of an innovations life cycle call for differing organization designs. Designs that fit early strategic contingencies tend to misfit later ones. Over time, innovating units must either minimize the negative effects of misfit, or make difficult changes in design. Using four paired case studies,...

We present the results of an empirical study of research and development in the semiconductor industry. The study aimed to understand the drivers of innovation performance in an environment characterized by close links to science and a combination of technical novelty and manufacturing complexity. The data reveal substantial differences in research...

Microsoft's and Wal-Mart's preeminence in modern business has been attributed to any number of factors--from the vision and drive of their founders to the companies' aggressive competitive practices. But the authors maintain that the success realized by these two very different companies is due only partly to the organizations themselves; a bigger...

When a new technology begins to transform an industry, incumbents have only three viable strategic responses, say the authors, and each is characterized by immediate or eventual integration with the parent. As evidence, they draw on several studies encompassing more than 150 companies in a variety of industries. Case illustrations include Silicon G...

This paper examines the interaction and impact on performance of two organizational mechanisms supporting generation and retention of knowledge: experience accumulation and experimentation. It provides evidence that generation of knowledge through experimentation and retention of knowledge through experience were significantly correlated with perfo...

Abstract Providing network infrastructure for authenti-cation, authorization and accounting (AAA) functionalities required by inter-enterprise business applications operat-ing over the global Internet is a challenging problem. The infrastructure needs to support large numbers of clients and services, and also to provide secure resources sharing bet...

Uncertain and dynamic environments present fundamental challenges to managers of the new product development process. Between successive product generations, significant evolutions can occur in both the customer needs a product must address and the technologies it employs to satisfy these needs. Even within a single development project, firms must...

The paper reports on an empirical study of the management of technological transitions. It focuses on project-level mechanisms for the generation of knowledge through experimentation and for its accumulation through individual experience. It proposes a model that links these mechanisms to effectiveness in the management of revolutionary and evoluti...

We present the results of an empirical study of research and development in the semiconductor industry. The study aimed to understand the drivers of innovation performance in an environment characterized by close links to science and a combination of technical novelty and manufacturing complexity. The data reveal substantial differences in research...

R&D effectiveness is based on the ability to translate fundamental research advances into effective products. In this paper, we analyze the linkage between the process followed by an R&D organization and its product outcome. We first develop a methodology to analyze a product's characteristics in terms of its ‘technological potential’ and its ‘tech...

The rise of the World Wide Web has provided one of the most challenging environments for product development in recent history. The market needs that a product is meant to satisfy and the technologies required to satisfy them can change radically--even as the product is under development. In response to such factors, companies have had to modify th...

We incorporate strategic considerations into the analysis of a problem that has hitherto been treated in a decision theoretic fashion: the allocation of scarce R&D resources when R&D proceeds in stages. In doing so, we formalize a notion of "system complexity" and investigate its implications for the allocation of these scarce resources. Using deta...

This article explores the drivers of product development performance in a rapidly changing environment. Effective product developers in turbulent environments, such as Silicon Graphics and NEC, provide a contrast to traditional product development. They exhibit a development process characterized by extreme flexibility and responsiveness. This, in...

The authors report on the results of an empirical study of the development of products based on novel technologies. Their observations are based on field investigations of recent projects performed by all leading mainframe computer producers. All projects focused on the development of advanced technologies for a specific product application, and pr...

We report on an empirical investigation of product development in an environment characterized by discontinuous technological change. Our sample is composed of field-based observations on 27 projects and 61 technical problem solving attempts by all leading organizations developing high performance mainframe computers. Different organizations attain...

We present a historical study of technological evolution in the mainframe computer industry. We show that the pattern of innovation in the industry is not well characterized by existing models. The incremental evolution of mainframe system performance as seen by the customer was the result of an aggregation that masked substantial discontinuities a...

We investigate the impact of two kinds of integration-internal and external-on dynamic capability. We use product development activities as a lens with which to focus on the capability-building process in a firm. We first develop a conceptual model of the capability-building process that relates specific problem-solving activities to the generation...

In this paper, we link the business concept of market uncertainty to the technical aspects of designing and implementing network-based services. We quantify our theory with a options like model, showing how to maximize overall gain from the market's point of view when providing network-based services in highly uncertain markets. We show how network...

Cuando una compañía afronta un desarrollo que podría transformar su negocio, una de las decisiones fundamentales que deberá tomar es de naturaleza organizativa: ¿crear un grupo autónomo para responder a esa innovación o, por el contrario, apelar a un enfoque más integrado?. También debe decidir en qué momento actuar y de qué modo evolucionará su es...