Understanding Technological Disruption: The Impact on Business and Society

Course Overview:   

Managing disruptive technological change has become a central global challenge of the 21st century. Rapid technological change is transforming the way people live and work, and how societies function. Digital changed the world, businesses were turned upside down, and COVID-19 in 2020 has accelerated this trend. Consumers have extraordinary access to information and services that change how they are seen as customers. Companies need to innovate and adapt at an accelerating pace if they are to stay ahead in the global competition. Through fast and agile processes, creative innovators are indeed able to appropriate these new technologies and adapt them to relevant use cases that could potentially disintermediate traditional lines of business or deliver previously unthought of business models. Some of these technologies are embodied in current buzzwords such as: Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things.   

Digital disruption is all about how this has happened, the winners and losers, and the new rules of the game. The driver for the current and imminent wave of disruption is the emergence of technological breakthroughs that can be leveraged by innovative entrepreneurs and forward-thinking companies. Digital transformation is all about how individuals, firms, and governments are responding, changing their habits, ways of working, and expectations of any relationship. These are radical shifts that everyone needs to understand and continually anticipate. In this course you will gain incredibly useful insights into digital. We will examine how innovation driven by emerging technologies is transforming the way we do business and disrupting well established industries. The course places itself at the intersection between business and technology and aims at strengthening the participants’ holistic understanding of the interplay between these two domains.   

Highlights of what participants will learn:   

• The winners and losers of digital disruption; Kodak, Instagram, Nokia and more  
• Over The Top business models and the utilities, they disintermediate  
• Blockchain and bitcoin; how it works and why it is a threat  
• Self-disruption through internal innovation and employee incentivization  
• Customer-centric design thinking and why big companies need it  
• Principles and stages of exponential growth curves  
• The rise of digital customers, the decline of physical networks  
• How the Internet of Things creates ecosystems for customers  
• The principles of new ways of working  
• The “Innovators Dilemma” of risking everything to stay ahead  
• Virtual Reality, Artificial intelligence, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things  
• Digitization of industries, firms, and the impact of intelligent automation  
• Models of exponential growth and technology adoption  
• Authentic leadership in a digitally changing world  
• The new millennial generation and the customer of the future