Coursera - Surviving Disruptive Technologies

The purpose of this course is to help participants and the organizations they encounter survive the waves of technological disruptions facing business, government, education and their daily lives.

The purpose of this course is to help individuals and organizations survive when confronted with disruptive technologies that threaten their current way of life. We will look at a general model of survival and use it to analyze companies and industries that have failed or are close to failing. Examples of companies that have not survived include Kodak, a firm over 100 years old, Blockbuster and Borders. It is likely that each of us has done business with all of these firms, and today Kodak and Blockbuster are in bankruptcy and Borders has been liquidated. Disruptions are impacting industries like education; Coursera and others offering these massive open online courses are a challenge for Universities. In addition to firms that have failed, we will look at some that have survived and are doing well. What are their strategies for survival?

By highlighting the reasons for the decline of firms and industries, participants can begin to understand how to keep the same thing from happening to them. Through the study of successful organizations, we will try to tease out approaches to disruptions that actually work. Our ultimate objective is to develop a strategy for survival in a world confronting one disruptive technology after another.

Syllabus

1. Survival: a simple model of the incumbent’s dilemma of how to respond to a potentially disruptive technology .
2. Kodak misses its moment: the story of Kodak and how, after inventing the digital camera, it failed to understand how it and the Internet changed the process of capturing and sharing images.
3. Blockbuster vs Netflix. How could a leading company fail to respond to a clearly defined threat from a new competitor?
4. Borders: was the company asleep when Amazon came along and disrupted book sales, publishing and reading?
5. The three amigos: what can we learn from Kodak, Borders and Blockbuster as a group of failed companies?
6. Can I borrow your paper? How the Internet has savaged one of our oldest types of media leading to the slow death of newspapers.
7. Books and Publishers: trying to maintain two business models at once.
8. Education: the industry that moves at a glacial pace faces radical innovation from non-profits to Coursera.
9. Dictators: probably not a promising occupation given social media-how the Arab spring changed a profession.
10. Risky business-are innovations in technology encouraging us to engage in too much risky business?
11. Moving things: will the USPS disappear? How can it compete with UPS and FedEx?
12. Some survivors: a few have managed to incorporate disruptive technologies into their lives and to flourish, at least for now.
13. Danger ahead: what new disruptions are on the horizon and who will be disrupted?
14. Strategies for survival: suggestions on how to deal with disruptive technologies and turn them into a successful innovation

also You can watch my other last: Coursera-posts