Articles

Six practices can help companies implement licensing as part of an open innovation strategy.

Internal knowledge markets can facilitate information sharing within large organizations.

Jonathan Byrnes offers techniques to improve your organization's profitability.

People with optimistic dispositions get jobs more easily and get promoted more, research suggests.

Early returns are in from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey. Here are major highlights of what executives and managers said about how they are — or are not — capitalizing on information.

How are organizations attempting to compete on their ability to capture, analyze and act on information? How do you win with data and analytics? MIT Sloan Management Review conducted a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives to learn how they’re turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage–or trying to, anyway. The major comprehensive analysis is still to come, but in these two companion articles (“10 Insights” and “10 Data Points”), readers will find an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face. To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called “The New Intelligent Enterprise.” Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter? This article reveals preliminary results from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey. The responding executives told us about their top management goals, their uses (and misuses) of information and analytics as they attacked those goals, and the management practices in play in their organizations. Among the findings discussed: - Innovation is identified by executives as their organizations’ primary business goal–significantly ahead of “growing revenue,” “reducing costs” and “acquiring customers.” - A strong correlation appeared linking an organization’s analytics sophistication and its likelihood of outperforming its industry competitors. - Analytics methods are evolving to include more advanced techniques, and especially more visual presentation and simulation “to bring information alive.” - Far from being a mainly technological phenomenon, The New Intelligent Enterprise requires significant changes to corporate culture and the nurturing of new kinds of talent, if it is to succeed.

Five years ago, analytics practitioners spent about 95% of their time reporting on the past and only about 5% on analysis. Most companies were not really focused on the issue of analytics. While reporting is good, it's not enough. Companies need to understand why those data turned out the way they did, what it might do in the future and how they might optimize a particular one of those variables. Thomas H. Davenport, President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, says the potential for analytics to become a critical tie to decision making remains an untapped opportunity for most companies. In a new MIT SMR interview, Davenport explores why the proliferation of data has not led to better decision-making. Davenport looks at the challenges that lie in the way of analytics being embraced by executives and how they can use analysis to understand and manage their business more effectively.

Effective social media measurement turns the traditional ROI approach on its head and measures investments made by customers in social media.

Organizations need to value the "soft side" of customer management: emotions, trust and control.

Energy sector innovation faces an important hurdle, according to MIT's Ernest Moniz. How do we reconcile the cultural mismatch between innovators and the establishment?