MIT Sloan Management Review

History shows that the road to technological innovation is long and winding, but lessons from successes and failures with other emerging technologies offer managers a helpful guide.

How do you win with data? SMR surveyed global executives about turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage. Here’s an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face.

In a global economy, sustained competitive advantage arises from tackling social, political and environmental issues as part of a corporate strategy — not just pursuing business as usual.

From Apple to Twitter, some of the most successful businesses are not what their inventors originally envisioned.

For many companies, developing new products is a hit-or-miss proposition. Some businesses with successful innovation practices are relying on a new analytic tool to ensure that the hits are much more likely.

How your IP strategy might be killing your open innovation activities — and what you can do to make it an enabler, even a builder of industrial ‘ecosystems,’ instead.

If one innovation approach is helpful, you might think using more than one approach to innovation would be even more productive. Not necessarily, write Frank T. Rothaermel and Andrew M. Hess in the new issue of Business Insight, MIT Sloan Management Review’s collaboration with The Wall Street Journal.

Courtesy of IBM.

Looking to spark innovation in your R&D work force? Look for employees who are motivated by intellectual challenge—but not by job security. Henry Sauermann, an assistant professor of strategic management at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Wesley M. Cohen, the Frederick C.

Want success for your radical innovation? Think like a community organizer.

That’s one of the messages of Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations (Princeton University Press, 2009), a new book by Hayagreeva Rao.

How does a large, global corporation capture employees’ ideas for new technologies? An article from the Fall 2008 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review analyzes the results of IBM’s 2006 “Innovation Jam” — which involved 150,000 people.

If you devise strategy by thinking only about the positioning of your company’s product or service, you are missing a huge opportunity.

The benefits of engaging customers in product development, product support and related activities are increasingly visible. Having the right technology-based system can enhance the customer experience and help companies improve both their innovation and customer relationship management capabilities.

Several factors — including constructive conflict — enhance a company’s ability to learn how to serve new markets.

Building an engine that produces a steady stream of innovative growth businesses is difficult, but companies that are able to do it differentiate themselves from competitors.

To understand how breakthroughs in innovation arise, managers first need to be aware of the different factors that shape the highly skewed distribution of creativity.

Limitless material resources are not only unavailable most of the time, they may actually be a hindrance. And remaining lean and mean can often be a blessing.

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.

Ask any CEO or speaking consultant what the most important aspect of public speaking is, and they will most likely say, “Know your audience.” But according to Thomas P.

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.