Thursday, August 3, 2017

Blockchain is poised to disrupt trade finance

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Next in Tech blog, August 3, 2017

by Grainne McNamara




Trade finance has enabled the exchange of goods for millennia. Babylonian cuneiform tablets dating back to 3000 BC mention the kind of promissory notes and letters of credit that still underpin international trade. And, aside from incremental improvements in the ways and means of trade finance, not all that much has changed in the fundamental elements of this approximately US$40 billion sector of the financial services industry over the past 5,000 years.

That is, until now. The advent of blockchain technology is on the verge of revolutionizing trade finance—and it threatens to leave behind any financial services company that doesn’t move with the times. Read the rest here.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

A Goldilocks Approach to Innovation

strategy+business, August 2, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

In 2008, when Nike executive Sarah Robb O’Hagan was tapped to lead Gatorade, the sports drink’s sales were in decline and it was losing market share to its principal rival, Powerade. She couldn’t turn to incremental innovation: Pursuing the tried-and-tested strategy of adding flavors and low-calorie options to the Gatorade portfolio had already run its course, and was not yielding returns. The idea of blowing up one of PepsiCo’s billion-dollar brands and the organization behind it in a bid for radical reinvention was too risky.

What did Robb O’Hagan do? Taking a page from Nike’s playbook, she refocused the 
company’s attention — and more meaningfully, its product development and marketing budgets — on Gatorade’s core customers: the serious athletes, young and old, who accounted for 46 percent of sales. Then, she began introducing new hydration and nutrition products designed particularly for that core group. Gatorade introduced a series of gels, bars, and protein shakes that complemented the sports drink and drove its sales, instead of cannibalizing demand for it.

“The innovations were diverse, targeted a specific set of customers, and posed little strategic risk,” writes Wharton School professor of practice David Robertson, author, with Kent Lineback, of The Power of Little Ideas. The new products also reversed Gatorade’s sales slide. By 2015, Gatorade, with sales of US$5.6 billion, owned 78 percent of the U.S. market for sports drinks, about four times Powerade’s 19 percent share. Read the rest here.