Articles

In an interview that is part of SMR’s ongoing series on the business of sustainability, MIT’s Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, explains why blending big-company culture with entrepreneurial innovation is the challenge that leaders must learn to meet. According to Moniz, large energy companies are the ones that have the capacity in terms of resources to scale up new technologies to impact climate change in a relatively short period of time. But to do so they need to be both “big and nimble.” “The number one overarching issue, which does pose business opportunity, business risk, and a need to rethink business models, is carbon constraints,” says Moniz. “As you know, 85 percent of our energy is fossil fuel. Fossil fuel equals carbon. Controlling carbon goes to the very core of the way we currently supply energy.” There are multiple strategies for dealing with innovation in a carbon-constrained world, including mergers and acquisitions, and investments in research. But the innovation culture is not natural to energy companies; until now they have been rewarded for reliability, not innovation. Cultivating an open mind, dealing with uncertainty, and balancing competing requirements necessary for innovation ultimately comes down to the judgment of senior executives.

To extract the most business value from university research, companies need to follow seven rules.

Most executives naturally gravitate toward one of these two approaches. The challenge is that companies need both.

In recent years, much has been written about evidence-based- or fact-based- decision making. The core idea is that decisions supported by hard facts and sound analysis are likely to be better than decisions made on the basis of instinct, folklore or informal anecdotal evidence. And many organizations have invested heavily in data processing infrastructure and analytical tools based on assumption that better evidence-based decision will follow from these investments. But research by the authors suggests that evidence is not as frequent an input to a decision process as managers like to think. Instead, what occurs is decision-based evidence making sometimes without managers even understanding, that it's happening. The authors address three key questions: Why does decision-based evidence making occur in organizations? Is decision-based evidence making the necessarily bad? And, if decision-based evidence making is inevitable in organizations, what can be done to lessen its negative impacts? To help answer those questions, the authors explain how decision making is affected by the contexts in which problems are presented- and how those contexts can demand different ways of using evidence, depending on whether the evidence is being used to make, inform or support a decision

It's not easy to build a strong culture worldwide. "Cultural hubs" beyond headquarters can help.

MIT's Andrew McAfee says that evolving technology and the data deluge can enable companies to act smarter.

In his book “Reinventing Management,” Julian Birkinshaw urges businesspeople to give more thought to management models.

The editors of the MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winners of this year's Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the authors of the most outstanding SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2008 to summer 2009.

Leading innovators are using information systems to make their activities more efficient.

Large companies that invest in trendy IT innovations may see their reputations — and CEO compensation — increase the next year.