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The Fall 2011 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review delves into innovation, including the intriguing role of individual innovators.

Even good ideas can fail if the pilot lacks credibility, replicability and feasibility.

Today's collaborative and creative leaders engage in six boundary spanning practices.

Ten years ago, executives looked to IT for technical solutions to support business units. Today, analytics has dramatically changed that function. As Monsanto Co. has pushed for analytics adoption throughout its organization, IT managers have become sought after for the answers they can provide to build competitive advantage and guide strategic decision making. Beth Holmes' job is to answer questions for the company through exploratory analytics -- and to advance Monsanto's organizational strategy of embedding analytics more deeply into all corners of the company's operations. Using analytics, her group has scoped out high-value sales targets, done cost modeling, improved the accuracy of sales forecasting and used multiple methodologies to aid long-range planning. The "exploratory analytics" team routinely tests assumptions about such things as commodity prices and agricultural trends. Building an understanding of potential scenarios is a critical component of the company's ability to operate profitably. Holmes spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins about myth busting, why the simplest solution is often the smartest, and what it means to push for analytics adoption by using the IT function for leverage.

To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of business analytics, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted a survey of more than 3,000 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations located around the world. The survey was part of the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project, which attempts to understand better how all organizations are trying to capitalize on information and apply analytics today and in the future. One of the most significant findings is that there is a clear connection between performance and the competitive value of analytics. Survey respondents who agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated them were twice as likely to be top performers. Three stages, or capability levels, of analytics adoption emerged from the research: aspirational, experienced and transformed. The article provides a comprehensive description of each, enabling organizations to identify where they fall in the continuum. In addition, the authors include suggestions for the best entry points and techniques for each level, and measures to avoid the most common pitfalls. Based on insights from the survey, case studies and interviews with experts, the authors also describe an emerging five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management and rapidly creating value–as leading businesses are already managing to do. These include (1) focus on the biggest and highest data priorities, (2) within each of those priorities, start by asking questions, not by looking at the available data, (3) embed insights into business processes to make them more understandable and actionable, (4) keep existing capabilities and tools while adding new ones and (5) develop an overarching information agenda that enables decision making and strategy for the future.

For more than a decade, Peter Graf, a computer scientist by training (Ph.D. in artificial intelligence), has focused on marketing at SAP, the business management software company. Since March 2009, Graf has had a new role: as SAP's first-ever chief sustainability officer for the company leading a global team that oversees all sustainability-related initiatives, from the creation of solutions that enable sustainable business processes for SAP customers to SAP's own sustainability operations, including key social, economic and environmental programs. Graf's first task as an inaugural CSO was one of perception. "I had to be very careful not to come across as a marketing show," he says. "That means when we talk externally, the initial conversation is all about SAP as a role model." Once SAP established their credibility based on their own initiatives and metrics, using their own systems, they were able to communicate to customers that they too could reach their sustainability goals using SAP's systems. Graf's second, and bigger task, was to grapple with internal corporate strategy. He had to make the business case for sustainability-driven actions -- and the case for trying to build SAP into a sustainability role model -- to SAP's own board of directors. His case was built on compliance, resource productivity, market opportunity, energizing the work force, and sustaining a business model. In this interview, Graf discusses how he made the sustainability case internally, what the payoffs have been and how SAP customers have -- and haven't -- responded.

When two business models, and two business units, make sense.

User-generated content platforms, open source software, crowdsourcing and knowledge markets these are all possible only because of the "social web," the interlinked virtual universe that to so many executives seems to offer the irresistible promise of providing something--ideas, work, decisions--for (almost) nothing, if only they could manage it right. Managing it right means understanding that even though the new platforms are all about harnessing crowds and communities, in the end those crowds and communities are nothing but a sum of individuals. And your company's social web efforts will succeed only to the extent that you are able to attract good individuals, motivate them to perform good work, and empower them to get to know and trust one another enough to collaborate toward the end goals of the community. The question is, How do you do that? The answer: by capitalizing on the motivational power of in reputation--that is, by designing and building an online reputation system that triggers and nourishes the kind of web community that will serve your company's needs. Using examples such as Amazon, eBay, Epinions and Yelp, the author describes how design choices of a reputation system can profoundly affect a community's culture, making an otherwise collaborative and cordial community into a competitive and even combative space.

An interview with Jim Fister, a lead strategist for Intel Architecture Digital Enterprise, by editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins. "The way that the younger workforce was educated, the way that they were trained and the way they want to come into the workforce is working naturally in a collaborative fashion. And they're doing it in ways that those of us who really were trained along the individual lines just don't understand. But we do understand the results of that, and by encouraging that collaboration, rather than trying to force people back through the exact same paths that we learned to become IT professionals or to become management professionals, if we can manage to actually adapt to their path, rather than having them adapt to our path, we're going to get results much greater, much faster, with a tremendous amount more passion, than we would have gotten otherwise."

MIT Sloan Management Review's first annual Business of Sustainability survey revealed much about what executives are thinking and doing about sustainability-driven concerns right now--as well as what's impeding their attempts both to capture opportunities and defend against threats. The most widely credited leading thinkers at the sustainability and management intersection, though, wanted to explore something else: the ways that many fundamental management and strategy practices will be transformed by the pressures that sustainability issues are already bringing to bear. This article identifies eight significant ways that current management expectations and practices will be affected by growing societal and economic understanding about sustainability. Among them: how labor productivity can be dramatically increased by sustainably designed workplaces; how companies "bump into" sustainability-related choices, even when they don't look for them; how a company's sustainability profile will become a proxy for the organization's overall management quality; how innovation results are improved by pursuit of sustainability-related outcomes; how sustainability efforts within an organization lead to more productive collaboration across typical organizational silos; and how transparency and trustworthiness will become increasingly consequential to competitive success.