MIT Sloan Management Review

More and more companies are integrating their data with those of supply-chain partners, acquired divisions or vendors to whom they’ve outsourced their IT function.

How do new industries typically form? Who are usually the initial customers, and how is competition likely to evolve? Such questions have long interested researchers studying technological innovation and its impact on business. Adding to that body of work, Jeffrey L.

Recent research holds lessons for any company doing business in China: In a land where Confucianism originated over 2,000 years ago yet still exerts a major ethical and philosophical impact on the prevailing ­culture, managers who actively offer employees clear goals and rewards can strengthen organizational loyalty.

Incoming CEOs at major companies are increasingly flaming out early in their tenures. But the blame for these costly and puzzling derailments cannot be placed solely on their shoulders.

A focus on design —which translates to a focus on customers’ true needs and unarticulated aspirations — ultimately creates better-informed, more nimble companies.

Companies should focus less on marketplace premiums for their innovations and more on opportunistically exploiting subsidies for innovations. Thus Microsoft‘s Windows 95 development effectively garnered a $900 million subsidy by drawing upon a valuable technical population to test and help improve the system. An innovation subsidy, says the author, is individuals‘ and institutions‘ cost-effective bartering of resources to reduce risk.

Customer-focused transformation is producing long-term, sustainable growth through a systemic, tested process. The approach gets all employees collaborating to identify the outcomes that customers need — and to help them get there.

Many companies have developed strong leaders for business units but have overlooked developing people who act in the interest of the whole organization. Understanding three issues can help: What are the key elements of the enterprise leader‘s job? Why is learning to lead at the enterprise level so challenging? What can companies do to identify and develop enterprise leaders?

When companies act dishonestly, the psychological costs outweigh any short-term gains. Dishonesty ultimately decreases repeat business and increases worker turnover and employee theft. Degradation of a company’s reputation, adverse effects on employee values and increased surveillance of workers through expensive new systems eat at an organization’s health. The authors offer proof that honesty is still the best policy.

Intellectual property now makes up a large proportion of many companies’ market value, and IP management can no longer be left to technology or legal departments alone.

A “postcompany” school of experts says information technology is enabling a new world of seamless collaboration among businesses. They recommend that executives tear down the “walls” and merge their companies into amorphous “enterprise networks.” Nick Carr counters that new technologies will never conquer cutthroat competition and shows why managers need to be wary of alliances that foreclose opportunities for advantage.

Many companies keep their suppliers at arm’s length. But partnering with vendors — sharing valuable knowledge with them through organized networks — can be a sustainable source of competitive advantage.

Most organizations struggle to demonstrate business gains from investments in information technology. New research reveals how to meet the challenges of IT portfolio management to deliver tangible results.

The increasingly common practice of migrating business processes overseas to locales such as India, the Philippines and China is often seen as a negative phenomenon that suppresses domestic job markets. On the contrary, says the author, offshoring is a critical component of next-generation business design, a dynamic process of continually identifying how to deliver superior value to customers and shareholders.

For managers seeking to abandon follow-the-pack IT investment, the author offers the example of Inditex Group, a clothing manufacturer in northwestern Spain, best known for its Zara stores. Inditex demonstrates that a company can select, adopt and leverage IT while spending very little on it. He lays out five general principles that underlie Inditex”s remarkable success with targeted technology spending.

Often companies” budgeting processes don”t result in capital being invested optimally. The reason may be that strong personalities trump even well-designed systems. The authors profile five archetypes of bad behavior that line managers use to subvert logical decision making in order to grab resources. They also show how to counteract such behavior and instill values that lead to better use of investment capital.

An economy’s capacity to innovate determines its capacity to thrive. A company’s capacity to innovate determines its capacity to survive. The expected life span of a Fortune 500 corporation is only 40 to 50 years, and that life expectancy is getting shorter. Intel Corp.