MIT Sloan Management Review

Companies that pursue a number of improvement initiatives at once risk creating information overload for employees.

A new working paper examines the prevalence — and policy implications — of innovations that come from technology users.

In today’s world, it seems, people want to characterize every utterance and action as strategic — as if the simple addition of the adjective elevates the importance and quality of the thinking.

Employees spend increasing amounts of time in meetings and love to complain about them. But privately they see meetings as a productivity tool — one that companies can learn to use better.

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.

Companies should evaluate an outsourced process on several dimensions and then tailor the contract accordingly.

In volatile and uncertain environments, managers must encourage and enable the spurts of participatory innovation that lead to emergent processes and solutions.

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.

Successful outsourcing of back-office business functions requires knowing not only your company’s needs but also the 12 core capabilities that are key criteria for screening suppliers.

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

An economy’s capacity to innovate determines its capacity to thrive. A company’s capacity to innovate determines its capacity to survive. The expected life span of a Fortune 500 corporation is only 40 to 50 years, and that life expectancy is getting shorter. Intel Corp.

Often companies” budgeting processes don”t result in capital being invested optimally. The reason may be that strong personalities trump even well-designed systems. The authors profile five archetypes of bad behavior that line managers use to subvert logical decision making in order to grab resources. They also show how to counteract such behavior and instill values that lead to better use of investment capital.

Companies must understand their customers’ needs, appoint a manager to oversee the production of high-quality information, and recognize that information is not just a byproduct.