Innovation

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.

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.

Customers’ or suppliers’ descriptions of what they need may provide design elements for your next new product. Companies should listen carefully and identify whether need statements have opportunities for innovation embedded in them.

Any approach to leadership development that tries to reduce the complexities of leadership to a series of standard boxes to be ticked or traits to be emulated will have little enduring impact.

Few executives would argue that digitization's disruptive influence is growing rapidly. But surprisingly little empirical evidence has captured either the magnitude of digital disruption or how incumbents are reacting on a broad scale. In a bid to help address that gap, McKinsey undertook a global survey of C-suite executives to capture how digitization unfolds across industries and how incumbents are responding. With some notable and important exceptions, the answer is “not well.”

Blockchain has recently taken center stage in the conversation about management’s digital makeover. Many believe the impact of blockchain on the ways organizations function and produce value may be greater than other technologies that have grabbed most of our recent attention — data and analytics, the cloud, even artificial intelligence.

Bringing digital innovation to an established company such as Volvo Cars requires carefully balancing new capabilities and core competencies.

Near-term expectations for additive manufacturing techniques are overoptimistic.

Successful business model innovation requires an understanding of how business models evolve.