MIT Sloan Management Review

Under the right circumstances, companies of any size can grow to become platform leaders. And particular business and technology decisions can help platform-leader wannabes achieve their goals.

Many large and mature firms -- which still form most of the economy -- have difficulty analyzing the opportunities and difficulties created by the Internet. Here is a planning process, validated at several established companies, that puts e-business into perspective and helps make it manageable.

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.

Companies have four ways of building businesses from within their organizations. Each approach provides certain benefits -- and raises specific challenges.

Innovation in developing markets has less to do with finding new customers than addressing issues of product acceptability, affordability, availability and awareness.

Companies create product versions from multiple components. The big challenge is how to take the available components and combine them into the product versions and product lines that will maximize profits.

How innovators identify the critical things they don't even know that they don't know.

Effective patent strategy is tailored to the market, mindful of competitive positioning and supported by organizational structure.

New research suggests that five crucial conversations -- often overlooked or avoided -- are essential to the success of any high stakes project or initiative.

Note: The full text of this article is available to subscribers in PDF.