I haven't played Go but have been reading about it over the last little while since it turned out that an AI learned to beat the world champion in it. The significance of this is that those who knew the game of Go believed that it was out of a machine's reach to learn to …
Do founders insure against disruption?
I listened to a very interesting a16z podcast on disruption that involved a conversation with Clay Christensen and Marc Andreessen. They cover lots of topics but the part that interested me was when Andreessen was talking about what he perceived to be a fast disruptive cycle in Silicon Valley. (I am not so sure about …
Digitization and the Rise of Trump
An interesting thesis has emerged about the rise of Donald Trump and it comes from Clay Shirky. For fun, he tweeted an entire essay about the subject and you can read those here. His argument is simple. Rather than the two parties deciding who will be their presidential nominee, the Internet and social media have …
A Taste of Disruption
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 …
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, …
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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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 