While digital life races ahead, the rest of our life, from law to business, struggles to keep up. Business strategists, lawyers, judges, regulators, and consumers have all been left behind, scratching their heads, frantically trying to figure out what they can and can't do. Some want to bring innovation to a standstill (or at least to slow it down) through lawsuits and regulation so they can catch their breath. Others forge madly ahead, legal consequences be damned. In The Laws of Disruption, Larry Downes, author of the best-selling Unleashing the Killer App, provides an invaluable guide for these confusing times, exploring nine critical areas in which technology is dramatically rewriting the rules of business and life. The Laws of Disruption will help business owners and managers understand not only how to avoid being blindsided by customer rebellion, but also how to benefit from it. It will teach lawyers, judges, and regulators when to keep their hands off the system and it will show consumers the consequences of their digital actions. In the gap created by the Law of Disruption, golden opportunities await those who move quickly.

It used to take years or even decades for disruptive innovations to dethrone dominant products and services. But now any business can be devastated virtually overnight by something better and cheaper. How can executives protect themselves and harness the power of Big Bang Disruption? Just a few years ago, drivers happily spent more than $200 for a GPS unit. But as smartphones exploded in popularity, free navigation apps exceeded the performance of stand-alone devices. Eighteen months after the debut of the navigation apps, leading GPS manufacturers had lost 85 percent of their market value. Consumer electronics and computer makers have long struggled in a world of exponential technology improvements and short product life spans. But until recently, hotels, taxi services, doctors, and energy companies had little to fear from the information revolution. Those days are gone forever. Software-based products are replacing physical goods. And every service provider must compete with cloud-based tools that offer customers a better way to interact. Today, start-ups with minimal experience and no capital can unravel your strategy before you even begin to grasp what’s happening. Never mind the “innovator’s dilemma”—this is the innovator’s disaster. And it’s happening in nearly every industry. Worse, Big Bang Disruptors may not even see you as competition. They don’t share your approach to customer service, and they’re not sizing up your product line to offer better prices. You may simply be collateral damage in their efforts to win completely different markets. The good news is that any business can master the strategy of the start-ups. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes analyze the origins, economics, and anatomy of Big Bang Disruption. They identify four key stages of the new innovation life cycle, helping you spot potential disruptors in time. And they offer twelve rules for defending your markets, launching disruptors of your own, and getting out while there’s still time. Based on extensive research by the Accenture Institute for High Performance and in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, investors, and executives from more than thirty industries, Big Bang Disruption will arm you with strategies and insights to thrive in this brave new world.

It's time to stop just worrying about climate change, says Paul Gilding. Instead we need to brace for impact, because global crisis is no longer avoidable. The 'Great Disruption' started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and dramatic ecological change like the melting polar icecap. It is not simply about fossil fuels and carbon footprints. We have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world economy based on consumption and waste, where we lived beyond the means of our planet's ecosystems and resources. The Great Disruption offers a stark and unflinching look at the challenge humanity faces - yet also a deeply optimistic message. The coming decades will see loss, suffering and conflict as our planetary overdraft is paid. However, they will also bring out the best humanity can offer: compassion, innovation, resilience and adaptability. Gilding tells us how to fight, and win, what he calls 'the One Degree War' to prevent catastrophic warming of the earth, and how to start today. The crisis we are in represents a rare chance to replace our addiction to growth with an ethic of sustainability, and it's already happening. It's also an unmatched business opportunity: old industries will collapse while new companies literally reshape our economy. In the aftermath of the Great Disruption, we will measure 'growth' in a new way. It will mean not quantity of stuff, but quality, and happiness, of life. And, yes, there is life after shopping. The Great Disruption is an invigorating and well-informed polemic by an advocate for sustainability and climate change who has dedicated his life to campaigning for a balanced use of Earth's limited resources. It is essential reading.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming economies, societies, and geopolitics. Enabled by the exponential increase of data that is collected, transmitted, and processed transnationally, these changes have important implications for international economic law (IEL). This volume examines the dynamic interplay between AI and IEL by addressing an array of critical new questions, including: How to conceptualize, categorize, and analyze AI for purposes of IEL? How is AI affecting established concepts and rubrics of IEL? Is there a need to reconfigure IEL, and if so, how? Contributors also respond to other cross-cutting issues, including digital inequality, data protection, algorithms and ethics, the regulation of AI-use cases (autonomous vehicles), and systemic shifts in e-commerce (digital trade) and industrial production (fourth industrial revolution). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. In this groundbreaking work, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

Just as the Industrial Revolution brought about momentous changes in society's moral values, there has been a similar Great Disruption during the last half of the twentieth century. In the last 50 years the developed world has made the shift from industrial to information society; knowledge has replaced mass production as the basis for wealth, power and social intercourse. This change, for all its benefits, has led to increasing crime, massive changes is fertility and family structure, decreasing levels of trust and the triumph of individualism over community. But Fukuyama claims that a new social order is already under construction. This he maintains, cannot be imposed by governments or organised religion. Instead he argues that human beings are biologically driven to establish moral values, and have unique capabilities for reasoning their over the long run to spontaneous order.