Blockchain is considered an essential underpinning of emerging innovations like Web3. Yet some early adopters of the distributed ledger technology have experienced high-profile failures over the past 18 months, most notably in cryptocurrency and early enterprise applications.
As companies wonder where to begin, a new research briefing from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research outlines four business approaches to blockchain:
• Wait and see. This approach is suitable for companies in highly regulated industries that are risk-averse. These businesses are often content to leave early experimentation to others until there is clarity around profitability, regulations, and other market forces.
• Experiment. An exploratory path enables companies to try out blockchain-based products and services on a small scale without risk to mission-critical operations.
• Provide targeted offerings. This approach goes beyond experimentation to expand blockchain into targeted areas — typically those that aren’t mission critical.
• Go all in. This is the preferred route of startups or industry disruptors committed to building new businesses based on decentralized blockchain-enabled products and services.
When it comes to building new business opportunities, 80% of companies succeed in ideating and incubating new ideas, but only 16% successfully scale them, according to research by innovation advisory firm Change Logic.
Writing recently in MIT Sloan Management Review, Change Logic’s Andy Binns and Christine Griffin shared insights from their study of 30 successful and unsuccessful corporate ventures. They found that most successful companies follow a “scaling path” that provides leaders with a language and structure to reach their innovation goals.
Scaling paths comprise a clarity of ambition; an understanding of assets needed to access the customers, capabilities, and capacity the new business requires; and a willingness to use a variety of techniques to assemble those assets into a coherent strategy for attaining scale.
This approach to scaling helps leaders of new ventures learn and iterate as they go, adding new options and eliminating those that become dead ends, the authors write.
“Scaling is both art and science, and with the help of a scaling path, it can be managed with the same level of discipline and success that we have come to expect of ideation and incubation,” they conclude.
Minority households in the U.S. face significant hurdles when trying to buy a home. Government figures show that in the second quarter of 2022, the homeownership rate for white households was 75%, compared with 45% for Black households.
It will take “a big pivot” to close a gap that large and persistent, said Edward Golding, executive director of the the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy. “We really do have to make fundamental changes.”
Toward that end, the Golub Center and the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning recently hosted a lecture series on creating more equality in the U.S. housing market. Some ideas offered by experts in civil rights, lending, and government:
• Modify underwriting requirements to account for the effects of past discrimination and racism. • Involve a wider variety of banks, such as regional banks and those that are part of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, in government home loan programs.
• Prioritize community reinvestment in the Deep South, a region one local lender characterized as “capital-starved” and lacking philanthropic giving and major banks.
• Create public banks managed by the government to build community wealth and bring more affordable housing to underserved markets.
Article link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-business-approaches-blockchain-mit-sloan-school-of-management
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