Top Shelf Picks: Best Business Books 2018
Innovation
Data has become central to the way most corporations work, even when they aren’t obviously in the data business. What we are witnessing, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge contend in Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data (Basic Books, 2018), our choice for best business book on technology and innovation, is the advent of an economy in which data matters far more than capital, a change that represents “a fundamental reorganization of our economy.” The key insight of Mayer-Schönberger, the Oll Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, and Ramge, a German technology journalist, is that up to this point, we’ve used price as the key determinant of how resources are allocated — what we make, how much of it we make, what we invest in, and so on. But for all its effectiveness, price is also a blunt instrument. It can’t let businesses know what consumers might want instead of what they’re selling, or even how much they’d be willing to pay for the things they do buy. The advent of big data changes all this. Now, it’s possible to understand individual demand, and to customize responses to meet that demand. Businesses can now get a much closer look at potential suppliers and partners, as well as at their own internal operations. As a result, the transaction costs of doing business outside corporate walls are falling, which means that the economic case for the traditional big corporation is getting weaker. For Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge, this means that markets are becoming more important than firms, and the traditional corporation is at risk of becoming obsolete.
—Adapted from “Technology Emerging,” by James Surowiecki
Published at Mon, 05 Nov 2018 06:00:00 +0000
