MIT Sloan Management Review

The CTO of Tata Consultancy Services describes how he learns from his organization’s collective intelligence.

Generating good innovation proposals from within the ranks of the organization is only the beginning. The more difficult part is creating a selection process that identifies which ideas to implement.

Presentation experts Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds help world-renowned executives, politicians and thought leaders deliver stronger presentations. Here they reveal how to influence and persuade in a different way, regardless of whether you ever have to communicate via PowerPoint.

Fallout from the financial crisis could hinder innovation—by limiting options for technology start-ups.

A conversation with MySQL chief Marten Mickos about the day-to-day realities of making open source work, the new outcomes of enlightened self-interest, and why there’s no risk that you could rip off MySQL no matter how much they let you see.

IBM brought 150,000 employees and stakeholders together to help move its latest technologies to market. Both the difficulties it faced and the successes it achieved provide important lessons.

Finding the most effective way to brainstorm is easier once you figure out what you want to get out of the process.

More than ever, CEOs must develop their peripheral vision, scanning for faint — but vital — signals that will help them give their companies an edge.

Serendipity is not a strategy, yet that’s the extent of most companies’ innovation planning. The importance of innovation to a company’s future is unquestionable. Then why do so few companies have a process for it? The authors of a September 2006 working paper, Crafting Organizational Innovation Processes, address that question.

To tap fully into the swarm creativity of innovative customers and employees, companies must adopt a completely new mindset for doing business.

The flow of information, ideas and talent across organizational boundaries presents unique opportunities and potential threats.

Managing change does not mean dealing with chaos. In fact, continuous change is a predictable cycle with four phases, each requiring certain resources and a specific type of champion.

Few companies understand how such innovation occurs — and how to encourage it. To foster new management ideas and techniques, companies first need to understand the four typical stages in the management innovation process.

He probably wouldn’t, but Robert Taylor could lay claim to being the best-ever manager of innovation. In the late 1960s, Taylor headed the office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency that oversaw implementation of the first four nodes of the Internet.

Smartly placed, legitimizing constraints actually enable innovation by focusing it and giving it traction in the competition for corporate attention and resources.

Over the course of the past two decades, it has become increasingly, abundantly clear that companies must find ways to be more innovative, more flexible and better prepared.

For multinationals, it is increasingly difficult to maintain competitive advantage on the basis of the traditional economies of scale and scope. Future advantage will go to those that can stimulate and support interunit collaboration to leverage their dispersed resources.

Deal making and salesmanship are giving way to creativity and invention as the driving leadership ethos in corporate America.

Managers don”t have to be told that to innovate they need to embrace drastically different practices from the ones they use for routine work. So why don”t they do it? According to the author, when business leaders see what innovation actually requires, they often recoil. In this article, Sutton has developed eight techniques to move teams and companies from working by rote to innovating.

Great new ideas help only those organizations with the discipline and infrastructure needed to implement them.