Mobile Shoppers with Smart Assistants

In a future when shoppers have the assistance of artificial intelligence, will you have the Big Data to guide them to your store?

How often do you see someone shopping at a store with a smartphone in hand? Mobile devices will continue to augment customer experiences in ways that retail executives ought to know about. Consider a scenario: A future when the tastes of mobile-empowered customers are satisfied with the help of intelligent personal assistants. As smartphones grow smarter with apps like Siri and Google Now, users will shop more intelligently with greater satisfaction.

Managing a Black Swan Event

When catastrophes strike, organisations may 'fall apart'. Managers may try to prevent the 'breakdown' and sustain operations, but in the aftermath of a disaster, no simple 'fix' may restore the previous order. A mechanistic-view of organisations leaves managers ill-equipped to handle the consequences of an unexpected event, yet it remains a common view in spite of Black Swan events.

When organisations seize their signals

How can organisations best utilise data to navigate these rapidly changing times? Answering that question does not require us to entertain the successes, failures and potential futures of big data. It simply requires tools and capabilities that enable everybody to notice what busy executives sometimes fail to see.

The winds of disruptive innovation

Disruptive Innovation involves simplification. Clay Christensen, who coined the term, didn't quite put it that way, but explained how his theory represents the transformation of a complex and expensive product used by experts into something more accessible for a larger population.

In this way, it is also a strategic move. By targeting the bottom of a market with simplicity, the innovation disrupts the legacies of overly-complicated and costly competitors. You may enjoy hearing his examples in the following video.