Spring 2003, Vol. 44, No. 3

 

For the first time in what will become an annual tradition, MIT Sloan Management Review has joined with PricewaterhouseCoopers to honor the SMR articles that have contributed most significantly to the enhancement and advancement of management practice. This year’s award applies to the articles published in calendar year 2002.

The goal of SMR since its inception has been to illuminate, in ways most useful to senior managers, the interplay between the best in current management theory and practice. That mission inspired the creation of the SMR/PwC award and defines the criteria by which the winners are selected. An independent panel of judges concluded that the following three contributions clearly met that standard by addressing “key issues affecting businesses today” and presenting “new, clear and simple frameworks” and “implementable models,” all while making “good use of business-case examples.”

 

First Place

“Beyond Better Products: Capturing Value in Customer Interactions”
Mark Vandenbosch and Niraj Dawar

Commoditization has become a frightening and prevalent term in many corporate executive suites. In a day when many product innovations can be copied quickly by rivals, company leaders wonder where they can turn for sustainable competitive advantage. For some, the answer is to run a grueling, never-ending marathon in which products are the focus and the goal is always to keep just a little bit ahead. For others, however, great products are merely an entry stake into the competitive arena, and the pot at the center of the table must be won by capturing new value from customer interactions. In this article, Vandenbosch and Dawar lay out five specific strategies companies are using to reduce customers’ interaction costs and the risks they assume in making purchases.

Mark Vandenbosch is an associate professor of marketing at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Niraj Dawar is the Nabisco Professor of Marketing at the Ivey School.

This article appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. Reprint 4343

 

Runner Up

“Integrating the Enterprise”
Sumantra Ghoshal and Lynda Gratton

Over the past decade, many large companies broke their organizational behemoths into smaller entrepreneurial units. The smaller businesses could respond more quickly to market demands, and overhead was reduced at the corporate level. But fragmented companies also experienced a downside, as the empowered managers of smaller units had few incentives to share knowledge or other resources. Today management attention is swinging back toward the virtues of integration, but no one wants to lose the benefits that companies realized from the increased competitiveness of individual units. The way to retain agility while improving coordination, according to Ghoshal and Gratton, is through horizontal integration along four lines: individual units must have a standard technological infrastructure, a shared knowledge base, collective bonds of performance and a common purpose and identity.

Sumantra Ghoshal is a professor of strategic leadership at London Business School. Lynda Gratton is an associate professor of organizational behavior at LBS.

This article appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of
MIT Sloan Management Review. Reprint 4413

 

Runner Up

"Foundations for Growth: How To Identify and Build Disruptive New Businesses"
Clayton M. Christensen, Mark W. Johnson and Darrell K. Rigby

The concept of disruptive innovation has become well known in recent years, as research has shown that significant and sustainable growth results when new markets and ways of competing are created. And yet most large companies continue to invest only in sustaining innovations — those that meet the demands of existing customers or established markets. The authors argue that incumbent players must aggressively seek out new growth businesses, and they provide a series of litmus tests to help managers distinguish potentially disruptive new ventures from those that are only sustaining in nature. Creating new growth businesses isn’t a matter of making a lot of bets in the hope that a few will pay off, they say; the key, rather, is understanding the factors that lead to success or failure and building a robust, repeatable process for generating and nurturing disruptive ventures.

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor at Harvard Business School. Mark W. Johnson is the CEO of Innosight in Woburn, Massachusetts. Darrell K. Rigby is a director of Bain & Company in Boston.

This article appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of
MIT Sloan Management Review. Reprint 4332

 

Panel Of Judges

Karl-Hermann Baumann
Chairman of the Supervisory Board
Siemens AG
Munich

Alex d’Arbeloff
Co-founder, and former CEO and Chairman
Teradyne, Inc., Boston
Chairman of the MIT Corporation
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Judy Lewent
Chief Financial Officer, Merck & Co., Inc.
Whitehouse Station, New Jersey

Hector Ruiz
President and CEO, Advanced Micro
Devices, Inc.
Sunnyvale, California

Yoram (Jerry) Wind
The Lauder Professor, professor of marketing,
The Wharton School
of the University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

Donald Zereski
President and CEO, InfiniSwitch Corp.
Westborough, Massachusetts

 

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