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Many companies have established technology-based platforms or virtual customer environments to partner with their customers in innovation and value creation. In pursuing such initiatives, most companies seem to focus primarily on customers' innovative contributions, paying limited attention to customers' interaction experiences in the VCE. But the VCE experience has broader and more profound implications -- particularly for customer relationship management. In this article, the authors offer a framework to help companies understand and evaluate customers' VCE experience profile. The authors describe five customer roles in innovation and value cocreation: product conceptualizer, product designer, product tester, product support specialist and product marketer. Each role has something to offer. However, depending on the customer innovation role, the nature of the customer interactions and the technologies used in the VCE will vary. The VCE customer experience is made up of four components: the pragmatic experience (its ability to provide information), the sociability experience (how it promotes group discussion), the usability experience (defined by the quality of the human-computer interactions) and the hedonic experience (relating to mental stimulation and entertainment). Drawing on examples from companies including Microsoft, SAP, Samsung, BMW, Volvo and Ducati, the authors suggest strategies and practices to enhance customer experiences in VCEs and ensure favorable outcomes in terms of both innovation management and customer relationship management. Designing and implementing the right system can help companies improve innovation and customer relationship management. Therefore, managers should view their VCE initiatives as an integral part of their overall innovation and customer strategies. What's more, the costs of implementation can vary widely. Therefore, companies need to be careful about selecting and implementing a portfolio of strategies and practices that meets the needs of the types of customers they want to engage in value cocreation.

All corporations engaged in multiple lines of business face a paramount strategic imperative imposed by the stock market: Maximizing the profitable growth that is possible from their constituent businesses. Meeting this imperative over the long term requires such corporations to develop new strategy-making capabilities. So how can company leaders identify and exploit the opportunities that take the fullest advantage of their companies' capabilities and potential to pursue new strategies? In their attempts to meet the stock market's imperative, multibusiness companies in the past have pursued operational efficiencies by integrating business activities and have extended their existing strategies by combining resources from various business units. But that is not enough, say Robert A. Burgelman, professor of management at Stanford University, and Yves L. Doz, professor of global technology and innovation at INSEAD. Multibusiness corporations need to develop a capability for what the authors call complex strategic integration, which involves the discovery and creation of new business opportunities by combining resources from multiple units within the firm -- each with its own perspective and vested interests -- in order to extend the corporate strategy in new directions. Only a few multibusiness companies are currently trying to develop a CSI capability. But the challenges and imperatives for all companies are the same. Company leaders need to manage the evolving tension between reinforcing the company's core business and redirecting strategy in new directions, as well as the sharing and transferring of resources. They also must ensure that senior executives develop the political and entrepreneurial skills necessary to effectively pursue CSI initiatives, along with the ability to conceive of these new strategies. Above all, company leaders have to create a corporate context that facilitates CSI as an ongoing institutionalized process rather than as an infrequent occurrence that depends on the ad hoc championing efforts of some highly dedicated senior managers. That includes developing the appropriate organizational structures, control systems and incentives.

To achieve lasting competitiveness through IT, according to the authors, companies face three enduring challenges: focusing IS efforts to support business strategies and using IT innovations to develop new, superior strategies; devising and managing effective strategies for the delivery of low-cost, high-quality IS services; and choosing the technical platform on which to mount IS services. Three strands of research -- on the CIO's role and experience, the CIO's capabilities, and IS/IT outsourcing -- demonstrate that businesses need nine core IS capabilities to address these challenges: 1. Leadership. Integrating IS/IT effort with business purpose and activity. 2. Business systems thinking. Envisioning the business process that technology makes possible. 3. Relationship building. Getting the business constructively engaged in IS/IT issues. 4. Architecture planning. Creating the blueprint for a technical platform that responds to current and future business needs. 5. Making technology work. Rapidly achieving technical progress -- by one means or another. 6. Informed buying. Managing the IS/IT sourcing strategy that meets the interests of the business. 7. Contract facilitation. Ensuring the success of existing contracts for IS/IT services. 8. Contract monitoring. Protecting the business's contractual position, current and future. 9. Vendor development. Identifying the potential added value of IS/IT service suppliers. IS professionals and managers need to demonstrate a changing mix of technical, business, and interpersonal skills. The authors trace the role these skills play in achieving the core IS capabilities and discuss the challenges of adapting core IS capabilities to particular organizational contexts. Their core IS capability model implies migration to a relatively small IS function, staffed by highly able people. To sustain their ability to exploit IT, the authors conclude, organizations must make the design of flexible IS arrangements a high-priority task and take an anticipatory rather than a reactive approach to that task.

Managers must figure out when it's best to pursue strategies of position, leverage or opportunity.

The authors, including the Tata Group's former chairman, say companies need "a deeper purpose.”

Today's knowledge and service-based economy presents opportunities for well-run companies to increase profits through strategic outsourcing.

Self-comparisons can be demoralizing, but strategically comparing yourself against your peers can be a tool for growth.

Leadership Collection Not every leader is wildly charismatic or cut from the same cloth as other leaders in the organization. This collection of articles from MIT Sloan Management Review examines the ways leaders can turn their weaknesses into strengths, overcome their personal deficits, and position themselves to stay ahead of the curve.

When people think of services, they often think about offerings that are neutral or routine. These tend to be services they use regularly -- for example, dry cleaning, haircutting or gardening. However, there is a third type of service that is not often considered or well understood. The authors refer to these as "negative" services because they are related to events most people hope they will not have to deal with: toothaches, leaky roofs or collision repairs, for example. Because the events that trigger the need for negative services are not everyday occurrences, many people are not equipped to diagnose the needs or to make informed judgments about the solutions required; furthermore, even after the service has been provided, most people are in a poor position to judge its quality or the price they paid for it. Negative services are offered by many kinds of companies in many industries, including health care, insurance, household repair, pest control, ambulance use and so on. Companies discussed in the article include Laidlaw International, Multiasistencia Group, American Home Shield, Terminix, Fresenius Medical Care AG, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Sears. Sears HomeCentral, for example, is an attempt to turn negative services for homeowners into a profitable segment of Sears' overall business. Even companies that are not primarily negative-service providers have negative-service aspects to their offerings. For example, product companies often provide warranties as a means of staying competitive. Companies hoping to build positions in negative services face two major challenges: (1) how to access inexperienced customers who are not in a strong position to evaluate the service being provided and may have a poor idea of its cost and (2) how to organize and deploy their services to meet customer needs when demand is unpredictable.

Many companies leave risk management and business continuity to security professionals, business continuity planners or insurance professionals. However, the authors argue, building a resilient enterprise should be a strategic initiative that changes the way a company operates and increases its competitiveness. Reducing vulnerability means both reducing the likelihood of a disruption and increasing resilience. Resilience, in turn, can be achieved by either creating redundancy or increasing flexibility. Redundancy is the familiar concept of keeping some resources in reserve to be used in case of a disruption. The most common forms of redundancy are safety stock, the deliberate use of multiple suppliers even when the secondary suppliers have higher costs, and deliberately low capacity utilization rates. Although necessary to some degree, redundancy represents pure cost with no return except in the eventuality of disruption. The authors contend that significantly more leverage, not to mention operational advantages, can be achieved by making supply chains flexible. Flexibility requires building in organic capabilities that can sense threats and respond to them quickly. Drawing on ongoing research at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics involving detailed studies of dozens of cases of corporate disruption and response, the authors describe how resilient companies build flexibility into each of five essential supply chain elements: the supplier, conversion process, distribution channels, control systems and underlying corporate culture. Case examples of Land Rover, Aisin Seiki Co. (a supplier to Toyota), United Parcel Service, Dell, Baxter International, DHL and Nokia, among others, are offered to illustrate how building flexibility in these supply chain elements not only bolsters the resilience of an organization but also creates a competitive advantage in the marketplace.