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It’s common practice to develop a handful of strategic priorities to focus strategy — but formulated correctly, they’re also useful communication tools for both internal and external stakeholders. Clear, credible priorities linked to explicit metrics offer a framework for assessing progress toward the company’s goals, in a way that abstractions like vision or mission cannot.

Today’s retailers need to adopt a data-driven view — with the goal of understanding how website features and advances in AI will affect consumer behavior.

Technology has made business more globally connected than ever before. This is especially true for innovation projects, where diverse experts bring their specialized knowledge to play. But there’s a hitch: Many of today’s team projects have built-in hurdles because of differing communication styles, cultures, and professional norms. Leading this kind of “extreme teaming,” which often involves complicated hierarchies of power, demands both curiosity and humility.

When you’re developing a strategy for a new business, testing assumptions in your plan in a logical order gives you the best chance to make course corrections early — and not waste time and money.

Many of today’s most successful companies are able to leverage business model scalability to achieve profitable growth. Executives need to factor scalability attributes into their business model design, or they risk being left behind.

What happens when a company whose roots go back over a century — a bank, no less — decides to adopt agile management methods developed in the software industry? Though ING bank in the Netherlands is less than three years into the process — and it’s therefore premature to declare the initiative a success — taking a deep dive into the organization’s early experience with agile is nonetheless instructive.

Responding to a recently published essay, an MIT SMR reader pushed back against the view that managers must prepare for radical and rapid change in a digital world; he argued that this position may be overly alarmist. The discussion continues.

Collaborations between companies and universities are critical drivers of the innovation economy. As many corporations look to open innovation to augment their internal R&D efforts, universities have become essential partners. However, companies often struggle to establish and run university partnerships effectively.

This volume describes the ways that OI expands the space for innovation, describing a range of OI practices, participants, and trends. The contributors come from practice and academe, and reflect international, cross-sector, and transdisciplinary perspectives. They report on a variety of OI initiatives, offer theoretical frameworks, and consider new arenas for OI from manufacturing to education.

Lurking within the financial statements and communications of public companies is a troubling trend. Alternative metrics, once used sparingly, have become increasingly ubiquitous and more detached from reality.