Platform companies continue to surprise and challenge conventional approaches to creating value. The 2018 MIT Platform Strategy Summit brought together innovative leaders who are playing a major role in the changing digital economy. Learn from their experience with five major principles for creating new value with platforms.

In a webinar featuring Google Cloud’s Quentin Hardy, MIT SMR looks at historical precedents of disruptive technologies and how they remade society — and work — in the past. Are we on the brink of the next big technological disruption to business, labor, and education thanks to Big Data and Cloud technologies? And how do managers prepare themselves, their teams, and their organizations for the changes to come?

With the rise of blockchain and adoption of cryptocurrencies, companies across different industries can benefit from the increased trust and transparency these emerging technologies provide. Most executives recognize the need to prioritize blockchain as part of their business strategy, but the question of how to adopt and reskill can be daunting.

Organizations need to rotate quickly from the core business that has sustained them in the past toward new opportunities. The key to turning that ambition into financial reality? Setting the state for change by mastering three critical preconditions.

The most popular articles from the MIT SMR archive reflect the depth and range of management challenges our readers face in areas such as innovation, leadership, strategy, and technology. Authors of these “must reads” include MIT Sloan faculty Nelson Repenning and Donald Sull, plus Clayton Christensen, Albert Segars, Michael Schrage, Sam Ransbotham, David Kiron, Philipp Gerbert, and Martin Reeves.

Political struggles for control and decision-making often result in blocking or slowing down progress on digital initiatives. In this webinar, digital strategist Jane McConnell discusses her research findings on digital maturity and shares her guidelines for preventing politics from upending digital initiatives.

When it comes to transformation, many organizations struggle with a dilemma of digital growth happening at the expense of customer satisfaction. By moving to a platform-based approach, companies can align tech investments and new features with the customer experience.

In the eyes of many leaders, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies are the most disruptive forces on the horizon. But most organizations don’t have a strategy to address them.

The accelerating pace of technology, fueled by hyperspecialization, digitization, and the ability to control these new environments, has been quietly ushering in a new economy set to disrupt every industry — the coherence economy.

There are four different pathways that businesses can take to become top performers in the digital economy. Leadership’s role is to determine which pathway the company should pursue – and how aggressively to move.

As sexy as it is to speculate about new technologies such as AI, robots, and the internet of things, the focus on technology can steer the conversation in a dangerous direction. Because when it comes to digital transformation, digital is not the answer. Transformation is. In various industries, including banking, paint, and shipbuilding, digital leaders are finding that technology’s value comes from doing business differently because technology makes it possible.

A study of 250 global companies found that a company’s digital intelligence is informed by four dimensions: strategy, culture, organization, and capabilities. Within these dimensions, the research identified 18 management practices that contribute the most to digital leaders’ financial and market success — and offer a road map for companies seeking to expand their digital know-how.

Despite the many differences between the nature of digital strategy at digitally maturing companies, our research demonstrates that these strategies still share a number of common characteristics. Understanding these shared characteristics can help ensure that your company’s digital strategy is on the right track.

Leaders today must wean their companies away from three pieces of conventional wisdom about digital strategy: agility, first-mover advantage, and minimum viable product. These ideas have anchored technological decision-making for over a decade but are highly unsuitable for the emerging world. In conditions of environmental uncertainty and interconnected technology, we need more thoughtfulness rather than more speed.

Digital transformation is top of mind for many organizations. But many flounder by focusing more on developing the next technology breakthrough — when a core component of a winning digital transformation strategy is cultivating the talent who will lead the effort.

As demographic changes and technological advances upend the marketplace, MetLife has responded by making digital transformation the heart of its business model.

Leading a successful digital transformation isn’t about technological skills — it’s about being willing to experiment and take risks.

For tech giants and startups alike, Silicon Valley success is grounded in core business values and processes rather than technological know-how — with a unique twist. Tech businesses have made a commitment to flexibility that allows them to reshape their business models to the needs of an ever-changing digital environment, which gives them an advantage over less-adaptable traditional companies.

AI will augment jobs, much as electric ignition, cruise control, and back-up cameras incrementally improved the automobile. So the question is not “Which jobs will be replaced?” but rather, “How will jobs be increasingly assisted by AI?”

There’s a great deal of enthusiasm about platform strategies these days. Entrepreneurs pitch their startups as the next Uber, the next Facebook, or the next Airbnb, while executives in established companies are retooling their strategies around platforms to drive growth and compete digitally. But creating a successful platform business is not easy — as economists Richard Schmalensee and David S. Evans explain in this MIT Sloan Management Review interview.