MIT Sloan Management Review

While relationship marketing assumes that companiesrelate to customers, collaborative marketing requires that companieswork with customers to define, design and deliver value.

The need for speed places a premium on efficient decision making. But effective strategic moves also require organizational buy-in, which is best achieved through time-consuming consensus building.

You would think that a company like Intel, which in 2001 provided nearly 85% of the microprocessors for personal computers, would feel relatively secure. But companies holding the keys to popular technology don’t live in a vacuum.

A company’s interaction with the scientific community is crucial to its ability to incubate and commercialize new ideas.

Fast-growing founder-run companies are more likely than other companies to need strong boards — and less likely to have them. That's the message of a study by Annette L. Ranft and Hugh M. O'Neill.The researchers looked at 91 U.S.

Yes, the Internet can transform business, but for too many companies, it’s doing so at a glacial pace.

Unlike traditional stock options, benchmarking performance to company-specific risk creates a more accurate incentive and reward mechanism.

The external environment dictates to a great degree whether competition or cooperation is the preferred road.

Customer satisfaction among software users depends on a number of factors, the relative importance of which varies by country and culture.

To turn a great idea into gold, a manager first has to get the boss’s attention —and that’s a scarce commodity.

During the dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s, most large, traditional companies scrambled to find successful e-business strategies to fight off the aggressive new challengers. Unsure of how to proceed, many turned over their Internet efforts to the CIO and the information-technology organization. In most cases, that was a mistake.

The ability to set the right price at the right time, any time — the very definition of a pricing capability — is becoming increasingly important. Based on their work with dozens of companies, the authors explain how investments in human capital, systems capital and social capital come together to form a pricing capability that competitors will have a hard time imitating.

Many companies proudly think of themselves as innovative. The great majority of them, however, are adept at producing only sustaining innovations —products or services that meet the demands of existing customers in established markets.

Traditional teams are not faring well in today business environment because they are too inwardly focused and lack flexibility. The authors detail the high levels of performance of a new, externally focused team, the X-team and outline the five components of X-teams they have studied.

After nearly two decades, technologists and strategists are still working out a productive alliance in the business world. Many companies accept that information technology enables their competitive edge, but their efforts to partner it with business are failing.

In recent years, managers have become increasingly aware of the need to create value for their customers in the form of experiences. Unfortunately, they have often proceeded as if managing experiences simply meant providing entertainment or being engagingly creative. The issue is far more complex than that.1

The information age has created a host of digitized products — in the realms of software, databases, music, videos and electronic books — that can be produced and distributed with low variable costs, resulting in high gross margins.

Informal groups of employees do much of the important work in organizations today. To help those networks reach their full potential, executives must come to grips with how they really function.