A couple of years back, my sister, who lives in Manhattan, received an advertisement in the mail from a local clean energy firm. She sent me a text message with a photograph of the flyer and a simple question: “Should I do this?”

For the past few decades, this question never would have crossed the mind of the average consumer. Indeed, since consumer choice in electricity markets was essentially non-existent, it could not have.

With the proliferation of residential clean energy products in recent years, however, we may be facing an inverse problem: consumers may have too many options from…

Of all the ways to understand the zeitgeist that courses through Silicon Valley today — a topic that has been strip mined in recent years — a twenty-six-year-old essay about tennis by David Foster Wallace would seem an unusual place to turn.

Allow me to make the case all the same. (And, hopefully, do so in a way that does not produce the eye rolls that usually accompany an article aiming to make a point about something by David Foster Wallace).

Here’s the elevator pitch: in How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, Foster Wallace’s nominal objective is to review an…

For the past two years, I have read applications for a fellowship programthat offers seed capital and in-kind support to social changemakers with big ideas.

These changemakers are possessed of superhuman grit, passion, and shrewdness. They have assembled world-class talent around them. Their technology works. They understand the dynamics of the market in which they operate.

Most of all, they want to solve a deeply entrenched social problem.

And that is where, as far as I can tell, these applicants — and social changemakers writ large — often go astray. In their relentless pursuit of a solution to a problem…

The decades-old fight over the fuel efficiency of automobiles driven on American roads received renewed attention this week when, this past Monday, the Trump Administration announced it will be relaxing Obama-era CAFE standards.

Forgotten amidst this back and forth, however, is that the terms of this debate are rapidly becoming outmoded. Indeed, phrases such as “miles per gallon” will soon enough go the way of the word “horsepower:” the terminology may linger on, but it will become vestigial, possessing only a tenuous relationship to the object it describes.

The reason: the advent and coming commercialization of autonomous vehicles (AVs). AVs…

In the words of marketing guru Seth Godin, market segmentation can be reduced to a simple question: “Who, precisely, are you trying to reach?”

All too often, it’s a question that social enterprises, in particular, struggle to answer. A number of dynamics specific to social enterprises shed light on why this might be the case.

At the outset, it is useful to outline the definition and importance of market segmentation. By market segmentation, I have in mind the process by which organizations, at their inception, home in on the best end users for their products. The reason this task is…

Assuming Donald Trump moves ahead with his planned tariffs, the international trade community will need a way to hit Trump below the (Rust) Belt. It could land a solid punch with coal.

On March 1, President Trump stunned the international community — as well as his own staff and members of his own party — by declaring that he intended to levy tariffs on steel and aluminum imported to the United States. Reports suggested that this policy emerged during a fit of pique, and exact details are still forthcoming. …