By José Ángel de la Paz
EGADE Business School presented, for the second occasion, the INC Corporate Innovation & Growth Forum, at INCmty entrepreneurship festival.
The program, exclusively for large corporations, included talks and discussion panels with national and international experts in artificial intelligence (AI), data science, digital transformation and corporate entrepreneurship.
In addition, the forum included the workshop “Creating an innovation thesis for growth”, led by Dan Toma, cofounder of the consulting firm Outcome.
“The innovation thesis is a mechanism in a system. It won’t produce results on its own. Its strategy is based on assumptions, which is why the assumption needs to be validated before technology. And it’s not just a top-down process; everyone should participate if everyone is expected to support the strategy,” expressed the also coauthor of the book The Corporate Startup.
It's been a great week at the largest innovation & startups festival in Latin America, IMCmty. Workshop for corporate leaders on innovation strategy and keynote for entrepreneurs on the mindset you need to have when starting up. #innovation #startups #KeynoteSpeaker pic.twitter.com/35c8HX6Dk5
— Dan Toma (@danto_ma) November 11, 2019
Moreover, Juan Pablo Llamas, Director of Analytics and Big Data at Accenture in Mexico, offered the conference “Opportunities and challenges in an era of disruption: a framework for responsible artificial intelligence”.
“Neither organizations nor individuals are ready for artificial intelligence. Businesses need to train their collaborators properly, both technically and ethically, so they can leverage the benefits of artificial intelligence,” Llamas explained.
During the event the EGADExEd Board of Directors Executive Program was presented, together with the book Innovation and Entrepreneurship: A New Mindset for Emerging Markets, authored by EGADE Business School faculty.
The forum was inaugurated by Hugo Garza Medina, Vice-President of Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Strategic Entrepreneurship Projects.
This edition was organized with the support of Accenture and the Tec Eugenio Garza Lagüera Entrepreneurship Institute.
It’s time to get serious about artificial intelligence: Nir Kaldero
“Intelligent machines are now a reality and bring the greatest transformational impact to business innovation. If you are a business leader, you must guarantee the survival of your organization,” asserted Nir Kaldero, the forum’s keynote speaker.
The Head of Data Science at Galvanize, a firm that specializes in technology education, commented that today’s most innovative companies, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Alibaba and Netflix, count on the use of data science and machine learning to guide processes and add value to the user experience.
"The future of business innovation has an artificial intelligence component at the very core of its structure,” Kaldero affirmed in his conference “Operationalizing AI and measuring its ROI”.
The author of the book Data Science for Executives indicated that a plan for introducing AI implies having, first of all, a clear strategy for making the most of data, based on the business objectives.
He added that the human component and culture should also play a fundamental role in AI adoption.
Leaders, he explained, create habits and encourage employees to look at data in decision-making processes, bringing together non-technical and technical teams to obtain a return on investment.
“Technology truly offers a variety of marvelous tools, but it’s people who change the world, especially when we talk about the ROI behind artificial intelligence,” Kaldero concluded.