The In-Store Retail Imperative: A Return to Relationships
30 years ago the owner of the corner store knew each customer by name, what kind of gifts husbands wanted for their wives and what kinds of items families picked up each week. Over time things have changed. Retail shops merged into multi-category super markets and department stores and ownership consolidated into larger, and larger […]
Reinventing Retail Service for Shoppers on the Move
In a Darwinian retail marketplace that demands the survival of the fittest, individualized service is a differentiator and a competitive advantage. Unlike the traditional definition of service, when a hotline and a store greeter might suffice, today’s uber-ization of every industry means that the last best experience that anyone has anywhere, becomes the minimum expectation […]
Transparency and Trust in the Cognitive Era
We are in the early days of a promising new technology, and of the new era to which it is giving birth. This technology is as radically different from the programmable systems that have been produced by the IT industry for half a century as those systems were from the tabulators that preceded them. Commonly […]
Revealing the ‘Hidden Figures’ of STEM
Watch this short video on the making of the inspirational, Hidden Figures, a movie based on the acclaimed book of the same name that chronicles the early lives of three remarkable African American women who helped NASA calculate man’s first orbital flights around Earth.
Customer Engagement in the Center Aisle of Retail
A serious challenge is slowly brewing in the retail industry and will certainly be part of the buzz at next week’s National Retail Federation conference in New York City. As more consumers flock to brick & mortar stores for more personalized shopping experiences, a new study shows that the vast majority of retailers still do […]
Move Over Millennials: Generation Z is Retailers’ Next Big Buying Group
Millennials are currently retailers’ largest demographic, with a massive consumer base dwarfing the size of their once-dominant Generation X predecessors. And they love to shop online — during the 2016 holiday season, more than one-third of online shoppers were Millennials. But just as Millennials overtook Gen X, there’s another big buying group retailers and consumer […]
Why We Patent
To some, today’s announcement that IBM once again led the U.S. in patents in 2016 might sound as predictable as snow in upstate New York in January. After all, this marks the 24th consecutive year IBM has received the most patents. It’s what we do, right? But to gloss over this news would be to […]
Exploring the Brain in Search of New Ways to Combat Disease
Understanding the brain is one of the grandest challenges we have in science. By understanding the brain, we will understand how the brain creates our cognitive processes, how these processes are implemented in brain tissues, and how the brain differs from other systems we see and build. I’m a neuroscientist and have worked at modelling […]
Reimagining Financial Services with Blockchain
Across every industry today, organizations are looking to streamline and automate processes to reduce costs, gain efficiencies, radically improve speed to market and achieve better business outcomes. The financial services industry in many ways is at the forefront of such initiatives – with particular focus on today’s currently disjointed and redundant processing and reconciliation challenges […]
Cognitive Research Grows in Canada
Research is a key driver of how the world is shaped. It provides insight into society’s most important challenges and issues. It drives innovation, creates jobs, and contributes to the economy and the treatment and prevention of diseases. It also enhances our culture and diversity. Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario is one of Canada’s leading […]
Bringing ‘Hidden Figures’ of Innovation to STEM
When I saw the movie Hidden Figures, I was struck by the determination of the so-called human “computers” – the African-American women whose mathematical calculations made it possible for astronaut John Glenn to be launched into orbit during the 1960s Space Race that coincided with American advances in Civil Rights. The inspiring stories of these […]
The Power of Thinking Big: IBM Research’s “5 in 5”
Great scientific leaps rarely happen incrementally. They come from setting big, ambitious goals that move discovery forward. Think of the Wright brothers’ determination to fly, President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon, or IBM Research’s resolve to build a computer that could understand spoken language and beat the greatest human […]