How Alibaba Is Leading Digital Innovation in China

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2018

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ming Zeng, the chief strategy officer at Alibaba, talks about how the China-based e-commerce company was able to create the biggest online shopping site in the world. He credits Alibaba’s retail and distribution juggernaut to leveraging automation, algorithms, and networks to better serve customers. And he says in the future, successful digital companies will use technologies such as artificial intelligence, the mobile internet, and cloud computing to redefine how value is created. Zeng is the author of "Smart Business: What Alibaba's Success Reveals about the Future of Strategy.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at
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0:08.4	Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.
0:11.9	Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.
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0:15.9	Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.
0:18.6	Just search new here. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Ali Baba grabbed global attention in 2014 with its initial public stock offering.
0:51.8	It was the biggest IPO ever still is. Founded in
0:56.1	1991 by Jack Ma. Alibaba is now worth more than Walmart. 150 million people shop at Taubao, its online shopping site, daily.
1:06.6	Its popular mobile payments platform, Ali Pay, is expanding across Asia, but even though
1:11.9	the name Ali Baba was designed to give the sense of hidden
1:15.1	treasure, a name chosen to be universal, most people outside of Asia don't know a lot
1:21.5	about one of the world's biggest companies.
1:24.0	The point is it is no direct comparison in the Western world.
1:28.0	That's Ming Zeng, the chief strategy officer at Alibaba and our guest on the show today.
1:34.0	And the challenge for us is because most people in the West has no direct experience with our
1:42.0	main service such as Taubao or Ali Pei.
1:47.0	So they have a hard time to understand.
1:50.0	The value Ali Baba was able to create over all these years.
1:54.0	Zeng was a strategy professor at Iniad and wrote cases on the company before he joined
1:59.1	Alibaba and he says the company was able to grow quickly by leapfrogging existing technologies
2:05.1	and by leveraging data to better serve customers in fast emerging economies.
	...

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