Articles

Effective strategic guidelines get three things right. They link to the corporate vision, identify critical vulnerabilities, and focus on what matters most.

Chief information officers need to oversee all of IT – in close collaboration with marketers and the business units. Only then can companies deliver digital experiences that win, serve, and retain increasingly demanding customers.

Managers in manufacturing companies often keep process innovation activities tightly under wraps. Some companies have good reasons for keeping process innovations concealed. However, the authors’ research suggests that for most manufacturers, such defensiveness deprives companies of a valuable source of ideas for productivity improvement. Many manufacturers, they argue, can benefit from sharing process innovations rather than keeping them secret.

Following the example of Alibaba in China, Amazon is leveraging strong trust in its brand and its broad customer base to enter the U.S. financial market. While Alibaba saw opportunity in the lack of credit cards in China, Amazon could use credit cards’ ubiquity in the U.S. to reach a large pool of potential customers.

Throughout the 20th century, autos and the auto industry propelled human development, bringing unrivalled utility and flexibility to the way people move. Yet the industry now faces fundamental disruption as vehicle ownership yields to on-demand mobility.

A study of 250 global companies found that a company’s digital intelligence is informed by four dimensions: strategy, culture, organization, and capabilities. Within these dimensions, the research identified 18 management practices that contribute the most to digital leaders’ financial and market success — and offer a roadmap for companies seeking to expand their digital know-how.

Businesses develop strategies to address complex, multi-layered business environments and challenges — but to execute a strategy in a meaningful way, it must produce a set of specific actions focused on achieving clear goals. Rather than trying to boil the strategy down to a pithy statement, executives will get better results if they develop a small set of actions that everyone gets behind.

The successful use of analytics in sports, both on the field and off, comes down to integrating analytics within an organization. Three strategies — collaborative analytics, a common language, and accessible technology — are key.

For decades, researchers have published their findings about innovation in MIT Sloan Management Review. Here are a dozen of the best insights.

Finding the right metrics to track innovation is by no means straightforward. To avoid common mistakes, executives should take a holistic perspective on their company’s innovation process.