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Recent research explores the interdependencies between various approaches to innovation.

The irony: We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago.

Successful innovation--the kind that leads to customer engagement and profits--is rare and hard to achieve, or so one might conclude from observing the results of many companies' innovation efforts. Some have tried investing intensively in research and development. But the author recently studied public companies representing almost 60% of global R&;D expenditures and found that above a certain minimal level, there is generally no correlation between R&;D spending and financial metrics such as sales or profit growth. For many companies, developing new products is hit-or-miss. But according to the author's research, successful innovation is not magical. It comes from careful attention to a small number of important criteria. The key question isn't how much to spend, but how to spend. The author introduces a "return on innovation investment," or ROI2, methodology that correlates directly with organic growth and links innovation spending with financial performance in ways that can lead decision makers to generate higher, more reliable returns on innovation and R&;D. The ROI2 approach is based on a series of innovation studies conducted during the past seven years with companies in the consumer products, health care and chemical industries. To become more effective, a company needs to diagnose its innovation practices and capabilities. The diagnosis can be quite different from one company to the next, and that is why adopting industry benchmarks doesn't work. The individual innovation profile represents the value and quality of a company's innovation portfolio and can be clearly expressed as an "innovation effectiveness curve." This curve lets companies plot annual spending on innovation projects against the financial returns from those projects--and "solve for growth."

The recent economic downturn has left many organizations in a quandary. Just several years ago, the major issue was winning the so-called "war for talent": how to attract, motivate and retain the best and the brightest. But then the current recession turned that thinking upside down. Now, many organizations are scrambling to figure out how best to restructure and cut costs without jeopardizing the valuable human capital that they built during the prior period of growth. To help such companies, the authors have developed a framework that integrates the seemingly paradoxical practices of talent management and downsizing. The framework looks at two important dimensions. The first is the type of downsizing, either reactive or proactive. The second dimension of the framework is the approach to managing employees, either control-oriented or commitment-oriented. Those two dimensions--type of downsizing and approach to talent management--can be combined to form a two-by-two matrix consisting of four quadrants. Each quadrant represents a different strategy, with a distinct philosophy, focus and key HR and downsizing best practices. The authors contend that there is no "one size fits all" approach to downsizing and that managers need to devise the approach that makes the best sense for their particular company, depending on its position in the matrix's quadrants.

John R. Ehrenfeld is Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. He retired in 2000 as the Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program.He has been thinking about sustainability for a long time. "In 1967," he says, "I founded a research company called Walden Research, a good name for someone in the greater Boston area, to do air pollution research. And it was one of the handful, literally, four or five companies at that time devoted to studying the environment. I stayed there for a while and in 1978 I was appointed by President Carter to run a small resource agency here in New England called the New England River Basins Commission. I ran that until Reagan took office and abolished the agency. I've been the executive director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology since it was started in 2001. And then in-between I found time to do some lecturing, a little teaching, but primarily I spent the last five years, in putting a book together, my book, Sustainability by Design." Ehrenfeld spoke with Michael S. Hopkins, Editor-in-Chief, MIT Sloan Management Review.

In an interesting book, two Wharton professors analyze the innovation process.

Executives who fail to understand power forces at play may find their careers in jeopardy.

Designers at restaurants and theme parks are leading the way in thinking about how to make waiting in line more pleasant.

On the Web, innovative data reuse yields opportunities — and legal questions.