Digital Disruption
Which of the following was not discussed as a source of Big Bang Disruption?
A) Search Engines
B) Recommendation Algorithms
C) Social Media
D) Blockchain
E) Internet
D) Blockchain
Which of the following aspects / factors does not appear in a typical definition for innovation?
A) Is novel / creative.
B) Solves a problem.
C) Provides greater efficiency.
D) Increases value.
C) A new solution that adds value. Value need not come from efficiency gains.
Which of the following is an example of a cross-side network effect?
A) I value a telephone more when a larger number of my friends own a telephone.
B) I value Uber less as more of my neighbors use the service for rides.
C) I value my Internet service less the more congested the service becomes.
D) I value AirBNB more as a renter when a greater number of hosts list their properties.
D) renters and rentees impose positive cross-side effects on one another.
Which of the following is not one of the 5 V's in industry definitions of big data?
A) Variety
B) Volume
C) Viscosity
D) Velocity
E) Veracity
C) Viscous data?
A) The size of the training data set.
B) The number of nearest training data observations to reference when generating a prediction.
C) The proportions of original data that are used in the training-testing split.
D) None of the above.
B) k-NN = k-Nearest Neighbors. k is the number of nearest neighbors to reference.
Which of the following best describes an 'experience good':
A) Something I can locate all relevant information about and know, in advance, that it meets my needs.
B) Something I cannot locate all relevant information for upfront, and thus I need to consume to know if it meets my needs.
C) Something that I cannot be sure it met my needs, even after I consume it.
D) None of the above.
B) An experience good is a product or service I must experience to assess its value (because the value is highly subjective)
What core idea does jobs to be done theory advocate?
A) Customers do not buy your product for its own sake; they buy your product to achieve a bigger objective.
B) Don't guess what product your customer wants, ask them!
C) Constantly seek to disrupt your own product offerings, lest you be disrupted by someone else.
D) None of the above.
A) Nobody wants a drill. What they want is a hole.
In a platform world, envelopment threats are best identified based on what?
A) Whether products have similar features to my product.
B) Whether products have similar users to my users.
C) Whether products use underlying technologies / components that are similar to the ones I use.
D) Whether products are priced lower than my product.
B) Whether products have similar users to my users.
Data is a source of competitive advantage only when...
A) ... the data is combined with the right complementary resources.
B) ... a company is the first to hold the data, and the sole owner of the data.
C) ... both of the above are true, in tandem.
A) The one thing that is always true, is that data by itself is useless. It needs to be used in an appropriate manner to provide strategic advantage. B is not correct because competitive advantage is possible if a firm can devise a unique process or combination of resources that involve the data to leverage it.
Which of the following is the most difficult, yet also most valuable form of data analytics for companies to achieve?
A) Predictive
B) Causal
C) Descriptive
D) Prescriptive
D) this refers to anticipation and dynamic optimization in response, to elicit a desirable outcome for the organization.
According to the theory of disruptive innovation, what is the primary reason that incumbents fail to respond to disruptive new entrants?
A) Incumbents feel secure in their position.
B) It does not make financial / economic sense for incumbents to respond.
C) Incumbents lack an understanding of what the new entrant can do.
D) All of the above.
B) It does not make financial / economic sense for incumbents to respond.
What is often problematic about the traditional / canonical approach to innovation?
A) The innovations they yield require excessive resources to implement and deploy.
B) They yield innovations that are difficult to integrate into the existing organization.
C) They begin with what the employees think, rather than the customer's perspective.
D) All of the above.
C) they start with brainstorming, and 95% of brainstormed ideas are not useful.
Which of the following is not a distinguishing feature of a platform business model relative to a pipe business model?
A) Products are digital / software-based.
B) Network effects take precedence over sales.
C) Value flows in multiple directions.
D) Money can flow in multiple directions.
A) There are pipe products that are digital (e.g., Intuit Quickbooks) and there are platforms that are not digital (e.g., shopping malls).
Which of the following is not a fundamental difference of 'big data', that makes it more of a revolution than an evolution?
A) low-latency - data is granular, available in real-time, and it is decentralized (cloud and global connectivity).
B) high dimensional and high volume - we have enough data that we can now train AI systems well, and we generate more accurate predictions.
C) we now have the machine-learning algorithms to take advantage of the data.
D) the cost of storage and computing capacity has fallen to the point where neither is a limitation.
C) Many of the data mining algorithms in use today are not fundamentally new in any meaningful way, they simply were not practical to apply in the past. Most of the concepts behind deep learning, for example, are 35 years old (there are a handful of exceptions, of course).
A) We wish to avoid over-fitting.
B) Fitting a model requires more resources when it is trained on more data.
C) It is easier to derive a meaningful 'signal' in smaller datasets.
D) None of the above.
A) over-fitting is the primary concern we seek to avoid through data portioning. We want to ensure the model has not fit itself to "noise" in the training data, i.e., random variation / relationships in the training data that don't generalize to the population at large.
Which of the following was discussed as a common, effective strategy that incumbents employ when faced with disruption?
A) Lawsuits
B) Divestiture
C) Price Discrimination
D) None of the above
A) Lawsuits commonly are used as a means of delaying disruption efforts, to great effect.
Which of the following is not a dimension of a "job," according to JTBD Theory?
A) Social
B) Perceptual
C) Emotional
D) Functional
B) Perceptual dimension isn't a thing. I made it up.
When faced with a choice of how open one's platform should be, which of the following is a key consideration?
A) The extent to which demand follows a long-tail distribution.
B) Coordination costs.
C) Consistency of the brand and user-experience.
D) All of the above.
E) None of the above.
D) All three factors matter.
Which of the following is the biggest difficult today for most firms, when it comes to analytics?
A) Hiring people who can implement the algorithms / analysis.
B) Lacking the right data at the right time, to support analytics across the board.
C) Hiring people who can extract and engineer the data in the manner necessary to implement analyses.
D) Hiring people who know what questions to ask with data, and how to leverage insights to improve the business.
D) A majority of firms indicate that their biggest difficult is actually on the managerial side - people who can bring all the pieces together.
Which of the following was a pitfall of cloud-based machine learning offerings (like Azure ML Studio) mentioned in class...
A) You may find the website / service inaccessible at times.
B) They require that you upload your data into the cloud.
C) They are often graphical interfaces, which black-box the underlying algorithms, making it easy to mis-apply them.
D) All of the above.
B) The biggest concern is that you need to post your data to the cloud - if that data is sensitive, or private, this can be a problem.
Which of the following is an example of the role technology played in Netflix's disruption of Blockbuster?
A) Broadband internet facilitated Netflix's new streaming services
B) Digital Video Discs (DVDs) were small, light, and robust
C) Social media sensing pointed to late fees, a customer friction Netflix resolved
D) The internet introduced a digital distribution channel.
B) Streaming and downloads came post-Blockbuster, and social media wasn't really important yet.
JTBD theory says that organizations should evaluate product performance based on...
A) Customer word of mouth.
B) Sales and/or return volumes.
C) The metrics that customers use.
D) All of the above.
C) They specifically say you need to understand a customer job, and whether you are helping them accomplish that job. The best way to do that is to evaluate outcomes the same way the customer does, and try to improve those metrics.
Recall that on a 2-sided platform, there are 4 possible groups of network effects that may manifest. How many possible groups of network effects may manifest on a 3-sided platform?
A) Six.
B) Four.
C) Nine.
D) None of the above.
C) There are 9 possible groups of network effects on a 3-sided platform. 3 same-side effects + 6 pair-wise effects, in each direction (3 x 2).
As time goes on, data generated is increasingly...
A) Stored in the cloud.
B) Created in Asia.
C) Held by companies instead of customers.
D) Produced by smart devices.
E) All of the above.
E) All of these things are true.
How do we evaluate a predictive model?
A) We deploy the predictive model to assess its performance on new customers.
B) We examine the coefficients in the trained model.
C) We summarize the distribution of prediction errors in the holdout dataset.
D) None of the above.
C) We examine the distribution of prediction errors the model generates in holdout data (data it has never encountered before).