In the lead-up to the launch of The Disruption Dilemma (just one month away, pre-order here for hardcover, Kindle and audiobook), I wrote a couple of expository papers that have just been published in Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. The one in Sloan Management Review is free to access today and is called …
Game Theory and Apple's Encryption Challenge
A US Federal Court ordered Apple to work to de-encrypt the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Tim Cook has pushed back and vowed to fight the order. One suspects this one is going to end up at the Supreme Court and could be one of the most significant decisions for the digital …
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Is Kayne West leveraging monopoly power?
Kayne West has a new album. I would say 'out' except that it is only available on Tidal, a music service owned by Jay Z and other artists. Up until now, the artist owners have released their work on the usual variety of platforms. But last night that changed when West tweeted that his new …
Precognitive Antitrust and Disruption
One of the things I have been saying about disruption is that when it potentially arises what potentially disrupted incumbents will try and do is acquire the disruptive entrant rather than be disrupted by them. Consequently, incumbents have an important tool in their arsenal that can be deployed if they face existent threats. This was …
The NYT needs a mathematics editor
The other day, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Adam Grant. Grant is a professor of management at Wharton and an incredible academic star. His output is incredible but apparently he is into procrastination now. He has a new book out called Originals: How Non-Comformists Move the World. This is a pretty …
Louis CK does it again
Every so often a famous creative artist decides to bypass the traditional publishing and distribution system. It happened in music and Stephen King had a pioneering experiment 15 years ago for a book. But when it comes to television, the honor for disruptive attempts has to go to, the comedian, Louis CK. Back in 2011, …
Twitter needed strategy
What did Facebook have that Twitter did not? Ben Thompson thinks that it was focus on the news feed and not exploiting it when Twitter had the lead on mobile. He argues that failure has constrained it to this very day and appears to be pessimistic that there is anything Twitter can do to recover. …
Gender Discrimination in Scientific Credit
Last week I gave the Suzanne Scotchmer Memorial Lecture in Toulouse. I chose as my subject, my paper with Fiona Murray on "Markets for Scientific Attribution" because it was part of a research line that was one of Suzanne's last discussions before she passed away a few years ago. The topic of that research line …
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A word about #TweetFlap2016
As a professor who has to grade my belief is that word limits are good. Character limits are even better and I'll be damned if anyone will tell me differently. So when Twitter leaked or something that it was thinking of raising the character limit by more than 7,000% (from 140 characters to 10,000) I …
Creative Destruction and Inequality
In yesterday's post, I reacted to Paul Graham's much talked about essay on inequality by suggesting that the premise -- entrepreneurship causes inequality -- is far from obvious. Indeed, I conjectured that if things were working as they should, entrepreneurship would tend to decrease inequality. My argument was based on where the entrepreneur started in …
Digitopoly 