There is a fundamental humanity to business institutions. Businesses are cooperative endeavors that leverage human work and creativity to create social value. Stable, functional, and purpose-driven businesses are key to real human flourishing. And yet many governments are expected to be neutral about business, acting as either redistributor or regulator. There is a third role, though: facilitator.

Blockchain represents more than just cryptocurrencies and digital cash. The decentralized ledger system provides a platform for smart contracts, which are digital agreements that are fast, secure, and require no third party.

Innovation is transforming the health care industry, with unlikely collaborators teaming up to provide higher-quality, lower-cost services. In this interview with MIT SMR, Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses recent collaborations between retailers and insurers, such as CVS’s partnership with Aetna and Walmart’s with Humana, and explains why hospitals and other providers must be more innovative, too.

Each month, the MIT SMR Strategy Forum poses a single question to our panel of experts in the fields of business, economics, and management. This month’s question asks our panel whether ride-sharing platform Uber must develop a self-driving car capability to remain viable in the market.

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.

Blockchain is poised to help media and entertainment companies build innovative business models that offer new monetization strategies for their digital assets and streamline critical business activities.

Organizations need to focus on how blockchain can be used to support their unique strategies. Without this focus, they risk investing in initiatives that don’t provide meaningful value.

Despite the well-documented costs of overload, many leaders still think organizations thrive under pressure. They have a lot to learn from manufacturing, where managers have adopted a “pull” system to manage task flow, improving productivity and performance. This concept can be used to prevent overload in knowledge work, too. And “visual management” techniques make it easier to apply pull thinking to a portfolio of projects by rendering nonphysical tasks tangible. Two recent changes at the Broad Institute, an MIT-affiliated biomedical and genomic research center, illustrate how.

Innovation and disruption are transforming the health care industry, with unlikely partners like Walmart and Humana teaming up to deliver high-quality, low-cost care to customers. Regina Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses the lessons such collaborations between health care retailers and insurers offer for managers.

Modest questions about how today’s problems could be solved more effectively lead to applications of technology with easily foreseeable gains. But when people start asking bigger, bolder questions that challenge basic assumptions about how a problem has been framed, they open up space for breakthrough innovations. That’s been the pattern in many digital realms, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things.

How should companies launch products in times of uncertainty? Should they “wait and see” until uncertainty resolves — or commit to a full-scale launch and ride it out? Conventional wisdom says being early to market is the right choice, but that is not always the case. Many companies can benefit from a mixed, “act and see” approach.

A 2018 research survey found that companies see competitors gearing up for big data and AI success — and that’s fueling their investment in similar capabilities.

In the digital world, companies need to become a destination for customers. The key is using digital as differentiation and offering customers something compelling. This requires a new playbook for how to do business as well as new ways of engaging customers. The trend is for individual and business customers to prefer just one or two powerful ecosystems in each industry, raising the stakes for leaders to better understand their options and clarify their own game plans.

The dramatic rise of China’s digital leaders has put the squeeze on Western internet giants. Western players must learn quickly if they are to get back in the game in the world’s fastest growing digital market.

The art of bian lian — or “face changing” — is integral to Sichuan opera: A main character changes masks to avoid capture by foes. The transformation is quick and surprising, the new face clearly different. In the theater of business, Chinese performers are undergoing a rapid transformation of their own as they seek to evolve from backroom producers to the world’s leading face of innovation.

Emerging technology and new business models have created new ways of serving customers and allowed digital leaders to disrupt traditional companies. Disruption rarely comes out of nowhere, however: There are common patterns to learn from and three major signals to recognize in evaluating the risk for your industry.

Technology-intensive product manufacturers, automakers, or white goods makers used to be able to capitalize on their longstanding engineering and design leadership to cement their positions. But that’s no longer the case. Today, young upstarts in many product segments, especially from China, can develop world-class design and production capabilities in a short period of time. In some cases, they are closing gaps with long-established incumbents and becoming market leaders within a decade.

When pundits talk about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on the labor market, the outlook is usually bleak, with the loss of many jobs to machines as the dominant theme. But that’s just part of the story — a probable outcome for companies that use AI only to increase efficiency. As it turns out, companies using AI to also drive innovation are more likely to increase headcount than reduce it.

Virtually all human achievements have been made by groups of people, not lone individuals. As we incorporate smart technologies further into traditionally human processes, an even more powerful form of collaboration is emerging.

Businesses should use AI technology as a tool to improve customer service and processes, not just to imitate humans.