MIT Sloan Management Review

Companies are remarkably myopic when they go about forming strategic partnerships. Systematizing the analysis process should produce more gain and less pain.

Courtesy of BMW.

Continuous innovation is the engine that drives highly successful companies such as Apple, General Electric, Google, Honda, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Tata group and many others.

Many organizations commit large amounts of resources to maintain their competitiveness through innovative activities.

As sustainability-related pressures change the competitive landscape, what kinds of capabilities and characteristics will that landscape demand of companies that aim to thrive? Here’s what Business of Sustainability survey respondents and sustainability thought leaders say.

Knowledge sharing between partners has more upsides than downsides, provided that the right kind of knowledge goes back and forth.

To manage relationships with subordinates, colleagues, bosses and others, executives first need to know how to classify those people accurately.

The very factors that make partnerships with customers or suppliers beneficial can leave those relationships vulnerable to deterioration.

Should birds of a feather flock together? Not if the goal is to promote innovation, says Rachelle C. Sampson, assistant professor of logistics, business and public policy at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

A four-year study of Japanese business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce initiatives reveals the innovative ways Japanese corporations exploit traditional aspects of Japanese business and consumer retailing — specifically, the consumer’s preference for paying with cash and the willingness of corporations to form cooperative alliances (the keiretsu model) — to further develop the

Many companies keep their suppliers at arm’s length. But partnering with vendors — sharing valuable knowledge with them through organized networks — can be a sustainable source of competitive advantage.

Long-term sustained management of a strategic alliance is turning out to be the dominant challenge of effective IT outsourcing. From a relatively unusual entrepreneurial activity, IT outsourcing has recently exploded across the global corporate landscape.1