MIT Sloan Management Review

Innovative companies fund internal research and development to gain an edge in the marketplace. They also work closely with suppliers to offer greater functionality and performance for their customers. However, some critical new product insights don’t come from suppliers and customers working together but from the customer’s customers. Drawing on numerous examples from technology companies, this article explores the various ways parties can collaborate so that everyone benefits.

Everyone has experienced the frustration of having to repeat voice commands multiple times before finally asking to speak to a service representative. Many large companies have become so focused on optimizing their business processes and systems that they have become all too willing to forget about cultivating emotional connections with customers. But in order to detect and respond to shifting customer needs, companies need to show more, not less, empathy with their customers.

Finding the expertise to handle complex, knowledge-intensive team projects is challenging. That’s where a project network comes in.

Companies need to understand and manage the rising threat of online public complaining. There is ample incentive, because the best ways to respond, and to prevent complaints from recurring, apply not just to the Internet.

In sales, the rapport between a prospective buyer and seller can be the deciding factor. Using analytics, Assurant Solutions has tripled its success. (A case-study interview.)

Jonathan Byrnes, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics.

Imagine if you could make your organization more profitable — without the substantial pain that often accompanies significant cost-cutting.

Marketers and sellers hate product returns, but smart companies aren’t passively accepting them as bitter pills to be swallowed. They’re managing product-return policies to maximize future profits.

Designers at restaurants, theme parks and elsewhere have investigated how to make waiting in line more pleasant. What they have learned has profound implications for all managers.

In most large organizations, CEOs and senior management get the best technology and the best technology support, but this practice may actually put revenue at risk, according to two Unisys Corp. studies conducted over the last year.

In the early, hyped-up days of e-commerce, Internet retailers tried to focus customer and investor attention on the bells and whistles of their product offering or Web pages, and hoped that no one noticed the poor performance of backroom operations — or they deluded themselves into believing that good execution

Online retailers must distinguish themselves in three aspects of a transaction: customer interaction with the Web site, delivery of the product and ability to address problems when they occur

In January 2005, responding to a class action suit, Netflix Inc., the world’s leading delivery-based DVD-rental company, publicly acknowledged a policy it had practiced since it launched in 1999.

Reaping the elusive productivity rewards of information technology requires that an organization must change the way it does business. Schneider National took that dictum to heart and became a trucking and logistics powerhouse.

Breaking free of linear chain thinking and viewing value creation from a multidimensional grid perspective provides the greatest opportunities for innovation.

Electronic information can easily overwhelm people with large volumes of data. An abundance of information often strains human limits: attention, memory, motivation or other factors. In response to this challenge, software that assists humans in filtering and organizing information into more digestible amounts and formats have appeared (Alba et al.,

Many companies make incremental improvements to their service offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that generate new markets or reshape existing ones. To move in that direction, executives must understand the different types of market-creating service innovations as well as the nine factors that enable these innovations.

The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.

After decades of anticipation, the promise of automated decision-making systems is finally becoming a reality in a variety of industries.

Even the best companies let their customers down sometimes, and many disappoint frequently. The authors lay much of the blame for this on companies’ obsession with uniqueness and differentiation. According to their analysis, companies are too quick to dismiss “category benefits” as a source of advantage. They explain why companies such as Toyota, Cemex, Orange, Medtronic and Sony are successful because they are simply better at offering what customers really want.

In a world of commoditized products, companies are turning to service offerings for growth. The key to success involves redefining markets in terms of customer activities and outcomes, not products and services.