HOCHLEITNER - INSIGHTS , Business and Tech Insights

Supply chains management

Wed, 25 May 2022 16:35:55 +0000

To build resilience, manage proactively

Supply chain troubles in critical sectors, including agriculture, automotive, energy, and food, intensified. As the frequency and magnitude of the disruptions increased, applying ad hoc remedies to restore predictability to a system premised on ever-increasing cost optimization became more difficult. To restore the needed resilience, supply chain operators may need to consider a range of options, including structural reform.

Marketing in the metaverse

Wed, 25 May 2022 16:28:29 +0000

An opportunity for innovation and experimentation

Leading brands are already rewriting the rules of marketing.

Although many continue to debate its definition, the metaverse can be characterized as an evolution of today’s internet—and an opportunity for marketers to engage consumers in new ways via immersive digital worlds. Now’s the time to adopt a test-and-learn mindset and begin experimenting in the metaverse, moving on quickly from failures and capitalizing on successes. A new article lays out how organizations can think through their metaverse marketing strategies for the future, and why the metaverse is here to stay.

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Orchestrating Workforce Ecosystems

Wed, 25 May 2022 16:20:50 +0000

Strategically Managing Work Across and Beyond Organizational Boundaries

Research shows that orchestrating a workforce ecosystem is a multifaceted effort that involves integration among many business functions. In mature legacy organizations in particular, we see companies changing basic management practices around how they access, engage, and develop workers; we see leaders adapting to a changing workforce where they have more contributors but less control. In some cases, we see upwards of 30%-50% of an organization composed of contingent workers, and organizations increasingly relying on third parties to deliver some of their most essential services.

This research finds that as organizations increasingly rely on both internal and external contributors, successful leaders are recognizing the complexity of these workforce ecosystems and adapting their management practices to support these new systems.

Global Energy Perspective 2022

Fri, 20 May 2022 06:27:27 +0000

An economic rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered price spikes for multiple commodities.

The conflict in Ukraine has led to even further increasing energy prices and security-of-supply concerns.

However, according to Mckinsey research, the transition to a lower-carbon energy system continues and accelerates, and the coming decades will likely see a rapidly-changing energy landscape.

Mckinsey Global Energy Perspective 2022 provides insights into the longer-term trends that will continue to be essential in shaping future energy systems.

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Building a successful business design department

Fri, 20 May 2022 06:20:29 +0000

Embedding design. Building a modern, successful design department is one of four actions a CEO can take to drive revenue growth at twice the rate of industry peers, McKinsey research shows. But what makes for a successful design department and how do companies avoid siloing it off from the rest of the business? To answer these questions, we looked at data from three million—yes, million—designers and design leaders in more than 100,000 design departments, combined with their organizations’ financial performance. We also surveyed more than 250 business and design leaders and held interviews with 30 senior executives in leading design-driven companies.

Part of the team.The report, Redesigning the design department, reveas that organizational integration was the hallmark of successful design departments. Instead of trying to “protect” designers within the design studio, leading chief design officers work with the C-suite to embed designers into cross-functional teams and give them the training and the tools needed to collaborate and lead successfully. This practice was true across almost all industries that we reviewed: both B2C and B2B. We also found three core integration themes:

Cross-functional organizational structure. The best design teams had designers organized with dotted lines to their design departments (for knowledge sharing, tools, and community) but hard lines to their project team. All project team members—including designers, marketeers, financiers, and project managers—had a common set of financial incentives linked to time, cost, revenue, and customer satisfaction. And this included putting designers into cross-functional teams to improve the company itself, not just the products and services.

Nurturing design talent. Leading design departments developed their designers through training, secondments, and mentorship in business and technology to better integrate them into the company. They also recognized that designers put purpose at the top of their list of reasons to seek new employment. The best design departments recognize this and empower their designers with projects where they can make tangible improvements to products, to the organization itself, and to wider society.

Tools and infrastructure. For both physical and digital design, it was important to have collaboration tools that enabled designers to deliver their best work. Particularly, the digital domain we analyzed saw the introduction of more than 30 well-regarded new tools in the past four years. However, the research did not suggest that there was “one tool to rule them all,” but rather that “tool vitality” mattered. In addition, the rate at which design departments pilot, scale, and retire tools was a positive indicator of department health. And we believe this will be even more important as new generative, AI-based tools become more prevalent.

Big picture. Organizations that get these three themes right see benefits not only in financial performance but also through having happier employees, greater innovation, and stronger environmental, social, and governance impact.

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TOP AI COMPANIES 2022 HIGHLIGHTS

Thu, 19 May 2022 14:02:47 +0000

The AI 100 is CB Insights' annual list of the 100 most promising private AI companies in the world. This year’s winners are working on diverse solutions designed to recycle plastic waste, improve hearing aids, combat toxic online gaming behavior, and more..

CB Insights has unveiled the winners of the sixth annual AI 100 — a list of the 100 most promising private AI companies across the globe.

Some of this year’s winners are advancing the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) across specific industries — such as healthcare, gaming, and agriculture. On the other hand, some are developing applications to support sales, engineering design, cybersecurity, and other functions across a wide range of industries.

Additionally, a sizable portion of the companies in this cohort are developing tools, like machine learning (ML) platforms, to support AI development.

Using the CB Insights platform, our research team picked these 100 private market vendors from a pool of over 7K companies, including applicants and nominees. They were chosen based on factors including R&D activity, proprietary Mosaic scores, market potential, business relationships, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, team strength, and tech novelty. The research team also reviewed thousands of Analyst Briefings submitted by applicants.

Companies are categorized by their primary focus area and client base. Categories in the market map are not mutually exclusive.

TOP AI COMPANIES 2022 HIGHLIGHTS

We split this year’s cohort into 3 broad categories:

AI development tools: Nearly one-third of the companies in this year’s cohort are working on solutions to support the management of various stages of the AI lifecycle, from data annotation to model training to model monitoring for algorithmic bias.
Industry-specific applications: Forty-three of the winners are focused on applying AI to use cases specific to different industries, such as gaming, healthcare, and construction.
Cross-industry applications: Vendors here are developing solutions that can be utilized across multiple industries, including warehouse & logistics robots, sales & contact center tech, and engineering design tools.

Below are a few highlights from the AI 100 Class of 2022.

Overall funding & valuation trends: The AI 100 includes a mix of companies at different stages of maturity, product development, and funding.

Overall, the cohort has raised $12B+ from 650 investors, across 300+ equity deals, since 2017 (as of 5/10/22). This year’s list includes 16 unicorns with a $1B+ valuation. (Note: Neither unicorn status nor the total amount of funding raised were included among the selection criteria for this year’s list.)

Global reach: This year’s winners represent 10 different countries across the globe. Seventy-three of the selected companies are headquartered in the US. The UK came in second with 8 winners, and Canada followed closely with 5.

Other countries home to a winner/winners on this year’s list include India, Sweden, China, and Germany. (Note: This geographical breakdown does not account for companies with multiple global headquarters.)

Early-stage innovation: Thirty-nine of our winners are seed/angel or Series A companies with promising product ideas.

To highlight a couple, GGWP, which was co-founded by former professional gamer Dennis Fong, is combating toxicity in online gaming. You.com has brought together a team of research scientists with experience at Salesforce and Stanford in order to develop a search engine that enables users to compare and sort results.

Most-represented categories: Among the core industries highlighted on this map, healthcare holds the largest share of our winning cohort. The 10 companies featured in this category are focused on surgical tech (ACTIV Surgical), drug discovery for rare diseases (Healx), and more. Finance & insurance came in second with 7 winners, including vendors working on visual damage appraisal for cars (Tractable) and synthetic & anonymized financial datasets (Hazy).

Novel applications: A number of companies on this year’s list are working on niche applications where the use of AI is not commonplace yet.

To name a few, Whisper is developing sound separation tech to improve hearing aid performance. Notably, the company’s head of hardware engineering was previously a hardware engineer for Apple AirPods. Canvas Construction — founded by individuals with experience at Boston Dynamics and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory — is focused on AI-driven robotics for drywall finishing in the construction industry. Agility Robotics, on the other hand, is developing humanoid robots for warehouse and logistics use cases.

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