Innovation is transforming the health care industry, with unlikely collaborators teaming up to provide higher-quality, lower-cost services. In this interview with MIT SMR, Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, an expert in health care delivery and innovation, discusses recent collaborations between retailers and insurers, such as CVS’s partnership with Aetna and Walmart’s with Humana, and explains why hospitals and other providers must be more innovative, too.

Sports analytics first proved its case on the field and in the front office, but as the practice spreads into business operations, the industry is addressing adoption challenges found in many sectors. At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, speakers from teams and leagues discussed how they are using analytics to boost revenue, and how they’re managing transitions in culture and strategy.

David Harcourt of Yum! Brands Inc. shares his research and experimentation with HR analytics and shows how to align strategic talent management goals with HR analytics projects and activities.

Digital titans with access to large quantities of data are a challenge to competition. To maintain a competitive business environment, regulation focusing on both market and data dominance needs to be developed. Among the best tools for limiting companies’ influence: data audits.

Business has become too complex for boards and CEOs to make good decisions without intelligent systems. Just as artificial intelligence helps doctors use patient data to make better diagnoses and create individualized medical solutions, AI can help business leaders know more precisely which strategy and investments will provide exponential growth and value in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

The successful use of analytics in sports, both on the field and off, comes down to integrating analytics within an organization. Three strategies — collaborative analytics, a common language, and accessible technology — are key.

Analytics teams are often underfunded, misunderstood, and starved for talent. Extracting business value from data depends on nurturing the development and effectiveness of these teams — not just in terms of finding talent, but also in terms of getting leaders up to speed on how to use the insights analytics teams produce.

A global survey by the McKinsey Global Institute finds that AI is delivering real value to companies that use it across operations. C-level executives report that when they adopt AI at scale — meaning they deploy AI across technology groups, use AI in the most core parts of their value chains, and have the full support of their executive leadership — they are finding not just cost-cutting opportunities, but new potential for business growth, too.

Detailed and data-rich insights won’t help your company if your employees don’t know where to find them — but that’s a problem AI can solve. Machine learning can enable faster organizational learning by helping each employee quickly understand what others in the organization understand — forming a knowledge distribution network.

Most of us view our jobs as specialized or somehow differentiated, but the world of business and management increasingly feels otherwise. For many organizations today, the next big driver of job commoditization is automation driven by smart machines. Simply put, if a job is viewed as a commodity, it won’t be long before it’s automated. The key for workers whose jobs have traditionally seemed safe: Highlight the tasks that require a human touch.

As analytics and big data continue to be integrated into organizational ways and means from the C-suite to the front lines, authors Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern believe that a new kind of company will emerge. They call it the “mathematical corporation” — a mashup of technology and human ingenuity in which machines delve into every aspect of a business in previously impossible ways.

Many executives believe they are good at identifying leadership talent. However, when asked how they make their decisions, they often cite intuition or “gut” instincts. Social science research, on the other hand, suggests that individuals are often prone to cognitive biases in such decisions. Rather than just relying on the subjective opinions of executives, some companies are using assessment tools to identify high-potential talent.

On March 15, 2017, MIT SMR held a webinar to share insights from our report, “Analytics as a Source of Business Innovation.” Many participants asked questions during the webinar that we didn’t have time for, so we decided to answer them in blog format instead. This post is the second set of responses.

On March 15, 2017, MIT SMR held a webinar to share insights from our report, “Analytics as a Source of Business Innovation,” which summarizes our findings about the increased ability to innovate with analytics and its benefits across industries. Many participants asked questions during the webinar that we didn’t have time for, so we’ll answer some of them in blog format instead.

When it comes to putting data to use, communication — or rather, lack of it — between the data scientists and the executive decision makers can cause problems. The two sides often don’t speak the same language and may differ in their approach to and respect for data-based decisions. Given these challenges, organizations may need to call upon a “data translator” to improve how data is incorporated into decision making processes.

Organizations across the business spectrum are awakening to the transformative power of data and analytics. They are also coming to grips with the daunting difficulty of the task that lies before them. It’s tough enough for many organizations to catalog and categorize the data at their disposal and devise the rules and processes for using it. It’s even tougher to translate that data into tangible value. But it’s not impossible, and many organizations, in both the private and public sectors, are learning how.

The ability of artificial intelligence to sift through mountains of data and identify patterns — and problems — in real time is its key value for business. Using AI to predict failures and take action to prevent them will become commonplace in the very near future. But it can also offer insights into human behavior to help managers improve customer service and employee relations.

More tasks are being done by cognitive technologies, cutting costs, improving efficiencies, and displacing humans. This may lead to less differentiation between organizations, and a shifting composition of activities within the organization.