MIT Sloan Management Review

In the last 12 months, “innovation has become more important, not less,” according to innovation expert Vijay Govindarajan.

Here’s another example of a company reporting economic benefits from environmentally sustainable practices.

Need to lower costs? Think about “re-featuring” your product, suggests Scott D. Anthony of Innosight.

While layoffs make headlines, some companies are finding creative ways to respond to the recession.

Like most major change initiatives, going lean rarely looks good from the start. The operating efficiencies come quickly, yet sales and profits — for a while — get worse. The solution? Adopt a new financial reporting method that captures what’s really happening in the business.

Companies create product versions from multiple components. The big challenge is how to take the available components and combine them into the product versions and product lines that will maximize profits.

How leading companies use price, speed, quality and flexibility to drive innovation and shareholder value.

Effective product returns strategies and programs can result in increased revenues, lower costs, improved profitability and enhanced levels of customer service.

Too many managers still view their workforces as costs to be controlled and cut. There is a better way, but it requires organizational and societal will.

Advances in development tools have tremendous potential for increasing productivity, cost savings and innovation. To reap the full benefits of such technologies, though, companies need to avoid some common pitfalls.

In service businesses as in others, work can be performed and stored in anticipation of demand. By wisely choosing what kind of inventory to hold, companies can improve quality, response times, customization and pricing.

The purchasing function can go beyond mere cost cutting by rote. It can add value by driving innovation and superior long-term cost performance.

Contrary to a widely held assumption, companies can integrate a variety of techniques to substantially reduce costs, not just in the design phase but throughout the product life cycle.

As health care costs continue to skyrocket, companies must aggressively seek ways to work with employees and providers to reduce costs, while improving quality.

By sourcing and integrating knowledge from dispersed geographic locations, companies can generate more innovations of higher value and lower cost.

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.

Over the last decade, increasingly sophisticated supply-chain management has engendered six key shifts in the way managers think, in general, about their businesses and their partnerships.

Many companies boast that their employees are their greatest assets, but when the going gets tough, they shed those precious assets in an effort to cut costs and boost efficiency and productivity.

Electric utility companies will have to reinvent themselves to change from vertical to “virtual” integration based on value networks segmented into six areas: generation, transmission, distribution, energy services, power markets, and IT products and services.

In 1994, U.S. health care expenditures approached $1 trillion, of which private businesses paid a substantial portion.