The Fit Bit and Apple Watch are merely glimpses of what is to come in this space. This category is growing quickly to encompass products and services that go beyond the much discussed “wellness” category. These devices, such as IoT-enabled insulin monitors, are held to ever increasing standards of patient usability and convenience, which means offering enhanced patient usability and convenience is another important driver of innovation in this segment. In the near future, patients with (type 1?) diabetes may be able to monitor their insulin levels using a contact lens developed in a collaboration between Novartis and Google, providing a better patient experience by eliminating the need to draw blood. Cornell University has developed a SMARTCard which can analyze a small blood sample for cholesterol levels and provide instant results on a patient’s smartphone through the use of its onboard camera. For patients to care for themselves using these systems, they must operate the devices and interfaces themselves making user friendliness and fool proof operation key concerns for product developers.

CI managers across enterprises are realizing that they are fighting a losing battle against the burgeoning diversity of data. Traditional data management systems are unable to cope with the variety of data, and analysts are consequently too bogged down in low-value repetitive data collation tasks to fully apply themselves to insight generation. Going forward, MI/CI projects will need to be anchored to what are colloquially known as ‘smart’ data lakes to be able to handle complex data from disparate sources. In such data lakes, all the data that a CI analyst has access to are interlinked and stored using a flexible data model so that depending on the project, the relevant data can be extracted and reused.

Companies providing education technology products such as personalized learning platforms face a unique set of obstacles working globally. We had the pleasure to get some first hand insight into this topic from David Joo, CEO of Knowre, an ed-tech provider offering adaptive learning math products in the United States, South Korea and other international markets. He will be participating in a SxSW panel discussion “Winning the Asian EdTech Market”, moderated by Emerging Strategy Director, Satoko Okamoto on March 8.

The U.S. has generally trended towards lowering barriers to trade over the last 150 years, and since World War II the U.S. has promoted the liberalizing and democratizing effects of trade and interconnected economic relationships as evidence of its superior free-market approach in contrast with the closed economies of Soviet Union and other communist states. In fact, the U.S. has not withdrawn from a single trade agreement since 1866, when the Canadian–American Reciprocity Treaty with Great Britain was terminated in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

China is the 4th largest export market for U.S. goods and services, after Canada, the EU and Mexico, accounting for $124 billion of exports in 2014. Mr. Trump’s economic plan is tough on China, stating “China’s unfair subsidy behavior is prohibited by the terms of its entrance to the WTO and I intend to enforce those rules and regulations. And basically, I intend to enforce the agreements from all countries, including China.”