Prof. N. Venkat Venkatraman, David J. McGrath Jr. Professor of Management, Questrom School of Business, Boston University, is in conversation with Prof. Janat Shah, Director, IIM Udaipur and Prof. Prarthan Desai, Adjunct Faculty, IIM Udaipur regarding his book, The Digital Matrix.

Prof. Venkat shares his views on the shifts in business practices and models on account of technology, which he believes is the future of digitalization. He explains the concept of scale as follows – In the past, the scale and physical products, which are economies of scale in production and the unit cost was the driver of advantage. Today, if you take the Amazon versus Walmart in the U.S., the traditional way of looking at the competition will be that Walmart has lots of reach in terms of scale. But what Amazon has to scale is in terms of data and touch points of the consumer …this is where the difference lies, in the digital world. Amazon is able to collect data on how 200 million consumers who use different types of consumer products, different types of services, different types of information products to get insights that transcend industry boundaries; the scale is now web scale in which there are multiple hundreds of millions of data point.

Prof. Venkat also elicits the impact of speed and the context of scope, which digital technologies are enabling. He also refers to the impact on academic institutions on account of digitalization and provides suggestions, especially for business management schools, to adopt to thrive in the. 21st century.

Click here to read the full transcript of Prof. Venkat’s conversation.

Click here to listen to the transcript of the conversation.