Northeastern’s New MBA Offering, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
When Your Moon Shots Don’t Take Off – Harvard Business Review
Many scholars seek to understand how we can move away from incremental thinking to what Google calls “10x thinking”—ideas that lead to “10-fold improvements rather than the more typical 10 percent ones.”
In a recent edition of Harvard Business Review, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Strategy Nathan Furr and Brigham Young’s Jeffrey H. Dyer say the real limit to “10x” ideas are biases that distort our perceptions and prevent us from seeing possibilities.
The duo present tactics and tools to challenge our instincts to avoid risk and choose the path of least resistance with the ultimate goal of breaking through to the realm of innovative possibilities.
Furr and Beesley describe how cell phones, earbuds, credit cards, self-driving cars, and atomic power were all inspired by science fiction. “Science fiction can provide a kind of rigorous optimism. There’s no magic; science fiction just provides the inspiration and then you make a rigorous plan and go for it.”
You can read more about the research over at HBR.
New MBA x Computer Science Degree Addresses Market Demand for Tech-Savvy Leaders – D’Amore-McKim School of Business News
“Breakthrough technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and blockchain promise higher productivity, enhanced efficiencies, and economic growth,” says Raj Echambadi, Dunton Family Dean at Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business.
Future business leaders need leadership frameworks but also hard technical skills to have a deeper understanding of how technology will impact the future of business. To meet this growing demand, D’Amore-McKim now offers a new full-time MBA degree concept: MBA x Computer Science.
On the new concentration at Northeastern/D’Amore-McKim, the school writes, “Students in the MBA x Computer Science track will choose one concentration in business and one concentration in computer science thanks to a partnership with Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer and Information Sciences, and they will also complete a corporate residency–a distinctive component of the Northeastern MBA program that is the hallmark of graduate experiential learning.”
“Business and technology are now intertwined, and to master a skill set in both areas will set our students apart and set them up for success,” says D’Amore-McKim Associate Dean of Graduate Programs Kate Klepper.
Dean Echambadi explains:
“These technologies are changing the way we live, learn, produce, and consume content, as well as how employees and enterprises work across all industries. Advanced business education is a critical component in helping people and industries navigate challenges with digital convergence and turn them into opportunities.”
Read the full D’Amore-McKim School of Business News article here.
Social Media Advertising Can Boost Fake News—Or Beat It – MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter
According to new research from MIT Sloan Economist Catherine Tucker and Occidental College’s Lesley Chiou, Ph.D. ’05, restricting or redirecting advertising on social media could be part of a solution to the problem of fake news.
After Facebook released a new advertising system that blocks ads from pages that repeatedly share fake news, researchers found a 75 percent reduction in the amount of fake news being shared on the platform.
Tucker and Chiou caution that the solution is far more complex than just advertising, however.
“The actions of platforms such as Facebook in regulating advertising do seem to have had an effect on the volume of fake news. However, our paper also emphasizes that in just focusing on ads and fake news, we are missing the bigger picture, which is the organic spread of misinformation by users themselves,” Tucker says in a recent interview wit MIT.
“The popularity of fake news may occur in the absence of advertising, as users share articles with others in their social network, but working to stamp out misinformation in those posts runs into its own set of problems,” Tucker adds.
“Trying to regulate that seems to get us into very problematic First Amendment territory.”
You can read more about Tucker and Chiou’s research here.
Can Society Keep Up with Tech Entrepreneurs? – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
When Technology Gets Ahead of Society – Harvard Business Review
The Harvard Business Review recently dove into work by professor and Harvard‘s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute Director Tarun Khanna that examines tech entrepreneurs’ “insouciance about the legal and social issues their innovations birth.”
Khanna explains that one pervasive issue we are collectively trying to negotiate is that necessary “regulatory, logistical, and social barriers” often struggle to keep pace with new and increasingly disruptive technologies.
“Although electric cars are subsidized by the federal government, Tesla has run afoul of state and local regulations because it bypasses conventional dealers to sell directly to consumers. Facebook is only now facing up to major regulatory concerns about its use of data, despite being massively successful with users and advertisers.”
Khanna argues that instead of shortening the “period between the advent of a technology and the emergence of the rules and new behaviors that allow society to embrace its possibilities,” Khanna encourages tech leaders to “take more responsibility for the whole ecosystem and bring regulators and consumers along with them, all of society stands to benefit.”
You can check out the full article here.
Machine Learning Will Redesign, Not Replace, Work – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Sloan’s Erik Brynjolfsson, Carnegie Mellon’s Tom Mitchell, and Daniel Rock, a doctoral candidate and researcher at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, published new research in the American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, which finds that automation will most likely replace “specific tasks within jobs, rather than entire occupations themselves.”
Brynjolfsson writes, for instance, about deep neural networks that are adept at “tasks involving predictive analytics, speech and image recognition, and natural language processing, among others.”
The researchers write, “Automation technologies have historically been the key driver of increased industrial productivity. They have also disrupted employment and the wage structure systematically.”
“However, our analysis suggests that machine learning will affect very different parts of the workforce than earlier waves of automation. Machine learning technology can transform many jobs in the economy, but full automation will be less significant than the re-engineering of processes and the reorganization of tasks.”
You can read the full article here.
Northeastern Recognized For Excellence in Fostering Entrepreneurship – D’Amore-McKim Blog
At its recent Symposium for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Deshpande Foundation bestowed its 2018 Entrepreneurial University Award on Northeastern for the school’s “overall excellence in innovation and entrepreneurship.”
The Deshpande Symposium assembles “policy planners, academics, and practitioners from around the globe to discuss best practices for integrating entrepreneurship through university and college communities.”
This marks the second time in four years that Northeastern was honored at the Deshpande Symposium, having won the 2015 Excellence in Student Engagement in Entrepreneurship award.
Of the Entrepreneurial University Award, D’Amore-McKim Dean Raj Echambadi writes, “We pride ourselves in creating and training ‘Chief Entrepreneurial Officers’ who think differently and are capable of solving the grand challenges of business and society in a global economy.”
“This award is a testament to the strength of experiential learning through the integration of rigorous classroom education and real-world entrepreneurial engagement.”
The full article can be found here.
