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What if you could create designer probiotics using the gut bacteria of elite athletes, and what if those probiotics could enable consumers to tap into the biological advantages that make those athletes so special? Sound like science fiction? Maybe not…

Technological advancements have made it possible to imagine sports competitions of a very different variety than those we enjoy today. With so many avenues of entertainment open to us, it begs the question: in the future of sports who will the athletes be, human — or machine?

When you picture a screaming, sold out crowd at Madison Square Garden, esports (AKA professional gaming) might not be the first thing to come to mind. But with a current global audience of 385 million people and annual revenues of nearly $700 million, esports has become a growing and lucrative industry that’s promising enough to have even the owner of the New England Patriots investing.

Quartz’s Zach Seward takes a look at the interfaces we use to consume information and communicate with technology and remarks that as our familiarity with technology changes over time, so too does the form that technology takes. What shapes will digital (and physical) interfaces take in the future? That is the question.

What does it take to capture the devotion of a fickle fan base in a fiercely competitive industry? How can you capitalize on the viral popularity of a game within the ‘freemium’ model? How should a company strategically scale following one massive blockbuster hit? Professor Jeffrey Rayport looks to Candy Crush for the answers to these questions in this Cold Call podcast.

When then relative HBS newcomer Professor Bill Sahlman introduced the idea of an Entrepreneurial Finance course, he received little to no encouragement. Fast forward 30 years, and not only was Sahlman’s course hugely successful and popular among the students, but he succeeded in developing an entirely new framework to think about finance in entrepreneurial ventures that still rings true today.

In the digital landscape, the rules of strategy are changing. In this flash talk, Professor Sunil Gupta shares how to focus on the possibilities of technology – without missing the big picture.

The Internet is anything but boring; as a place it has become edgy, often rude, and infinitely fascinating. Businesses who aim to succeed in the digital economy need to understand this. Here, Professor John Deighton offers a primer on how to play — or else be played — in the Internet era.

With the rise of AI-driven personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, chatbots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and the market value of chatbots is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025. What are the causes and implications of this chatbot boom, and what will it mean for the future of business? Carrie Epstein and Amy Sinensky of Viacom explore the question in this flash talk from Future Assembly 2018.

How can businesses navigate this AI-driven future that we’re all moving towards? In this keynote from our 2018 Digital Transformation Summit, Amy Yu recommends companies focus on three things: data, talent and ethics.