Newco Shift | Covering the biggest shift in business and society since the industrial revolution

Report: The Corporate Innovation Imperative

Our latest research report is now available, which was focused on how large companies are internally getting ready for the many waves of technology disruption that are here now, and coming. Companies need to be ready, with a dedicated innovation program –not just knee-jerk reacting to each new set of technologies that emerges. We asked a number of companies on how they defined innovation, and heard this common pattern:

“Corporate Innovation Defined: Doing something new that solves customers needs –even if it may be in conflict with your existing business”

We’ve made a high-level partial version available to the public on slideshare, but the full report is limited to our members at Crowd Companies. Over the coming months, we will publish other insights around corporate innovation.

Download the report on Slideshare (or see embedded below)
Join me on a Webinar to discuss the findings

The Corporate Innovation Imperative: How Large Companies Avoid Disruption by Strengthening Their Ecosystem from Jeremiah Owyang

Robots, Yes Robots, Could Be Trump’s Greatest Threat

By jeremiah-owyang

*(image used under Creative Commons license* *via tecnalia*)

The rise of automation is destined to replace some worker employment, and it could increasingly cause friction with efforts to create new jobs, a hallmark of the Donald Trump administration.

Many studies have forecast a day when repetitive and labor-intensive jobs will be recast by automation, though the jury is still out about whether the humans now holding those jobs will be elevated to more meaningful positions that utilize automation or will be replaced outright.

#NoBan(2.0): Together We Win

By dilawar-syed

A joint statement by 130+ founders, executives and investors against President’s Executive Order banning individuals from six Muslim-majority countries from entering America

As technology executives, investors and leaders in Silicon Valley we are appalled at the President of the United State’s Executive Order (EO) signed this Friday, January 27 barring entry to the United States of individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries. Even current visa holders and permanent U.S. residents — many who work in our industry— are being prevented from traveling back home to the U.S. This targeting of individuals based on national origin and religion is morally wrong and profoundly un-American. We urge the President to rescind this order, and for the United States Congress and courts to step in and uphold our constitution (we are heartened by a federal judge’s ruling on Feb., 3 to halt the implementation of the EO, and the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Feb. 9 decision to not reinstate the ban. The administration’s revised EO announced on Mar. 6 still constitutes discrimination against people from six Muslim-majority nations. We reject the measure, and will continue to oppose).

Automation Is the Next Phase of the Collaborative Economy

By jeremiah-owyang

This may come as a shocker to many, but in the next few years, the peer-based sharing/collaborative economy will shift to automation.

I’ve studied this market closely and want to make some clear predictions on where things will head. Four years ago, I mapped out the Collaborative Economy, which is the phase where humans get what they need from each other (peer-to-peer commerce). In the next phase, the Autonomous World, robots will augment and replace humans, and they will serve humans. In some cases, robots will serve other robots as we advance further.

How Ryan Leslie Shifts the Connection Between Artist and Fans

By newco

Want to get in touch with Grammy-nominated artist and producer Ryan Leslie? He’d prefer that you text him. Leslie gives every fan his phone number (it’s 646 887 6978, by the way) and he now has over 40,000 fans in his address book. For Leslie, this is all part of the plan: every text goes into the platform he built, SuperPhone, and it makes it easy for him to connect directly with his fans and sell albums.

Leslie has produced songs for artists like Madonna, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Kanye West. He’s also an serial entrepreneur and technologist with a BA in Governmment from Harvard — which he entered at age 15, with a perfect 1600 on his SAT.

The Coming Tech Backlash

By ross-mayfield

The Leader of the Luddites, engraving in 1812

Tech innovation is killing jobs, not foreign scapegoats, and revolt after Trump will be Luddite

The tech industry played an influential role in the outcome of the US Presidential election. Not just in providing the medium for Fake News and propaganda.

The root cause is job destruction by Automation — that drove a base of dissatisfied rust-belt voters to support Trump. Job destruction is accelerating, and if Tech doesn’t get ahead of this problem, there will be a significant populist backlash against the industry and it’s ability to progress.

When Tech Has to Choose Between Its President and Its Customers — Who Wins?

By scott-rosenberg

OpEd

A political crisis is not an A/B test

Here are some scenarios tech CEOs and employees are likely to encounter over the next four years:

(1) A foreign government is suspected of attacking a network or a site that opposes President Trump — a site that is a partner of yours. “It could be anyone,” the White House says, and forbids companies from investigating on the grounds that they are imperiling national security. Do you ignore the attack, or the President?

The Ethical Puzzles of Google’s Jigsaw

By scott-rosenberg

Jigsaw is the incubator inside Alphabet/Google, formerly known as Google Ideas, that tackles “geopolitical challenges” and provides support for activists, journalists, and free speech around the world. In Quartz, Lucy Wark tries to figure out how the pieces of Jigsaw fit together. She finds it’s not pursuing save-the-world style initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s efforts to cure diseases and alleviate poverty; its narrower focus on speech issues has a distinctly classical-liberal, if not outright libertarian, bent.

Does Jigsaw’s work represent “do the right thing” philanthropy, or is it — as Julian Assange and others have charged — part of a more sinister Google-imperialist plot? Wark finds little evidence for the latter, but she suggests that Jigsaw’s failure to carefully define its ideals and goals leaves it open to suspicion and confusion.

Can Your Employees Get Comfortable with Being Tracked? These Tips Will Help.

By alina-bradford

Get Shift Done: Management

Source: http://hidetools.com/employee-monitor.html

Cloud-based tracking software, such as email trackers or browser recorders, are common in today’s business environment. That doesn’t mean your employees are particularly thrilled with the idea. Running a successful business hinges, at least in part, on the happiness of your employees. So before you rev up that tracking software, here are a couple of way to make your employees as comfortable as possible.

Don’t Be Sneaky

You may think that the best way to catch dishonest employees is by keeping your tracking software a secret. Bad idea. Chances are, no matter how sneaky you are, they’ll catch on to the fact you’re using some kind of tracker. Once that happens, you’ll lose credibility with your staff and they will feel like you’re spying on them or worse, that you don’t trust them.

The Real Moonshot of Our Time

By tim-leberecht

Instead of “techsplaining” the future, we need radical humanism

As we adjust to living digital cheek by digital jowl in our hyper-connected world, we’re rapidly approaching a technological shift that will be even bigger than the Internet — the union of man and machine. Some would say that day has already come, as we go about our business tethered to Google Now and Snapchat.

But the coming wave of super-intelligent computers will accelerate and deepen our connection to technology like never before. In the near future, computers will possess increasingly sophisticated types of machine intelligence and “deep learning” algorithms. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will challenge us to rethink what it means to be human.