January’s Most Read Articles

Here are the ten most-read articles from MIT Sloan Management Review during the month of January. Nine are from the current winter issue–number six in the list, however, is from 1984.

1. The 5 Myths of Innovation
   By Julian Birkinshaw, Cyril Bouquet and J.-L. Barsoux
   Nowadays, goes the theory, innovation is supposed to be done constantly, by everyone in the company, improving everything the company is about — and new Web-based tools are here to help it happen. Is the theory right? Or do the experiences of companies reveal something different?
2. How to Find Answers Within Your Company
   By Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne
   Internal knowledge markets can facilitate information sharing within large organizations. The trick for executives is figuring out how to make them work.
3. What Happens When You Outsource Too Much?
   By Francesco Zirpoli and Markus C. Becker
   With complex products such as automobiles, integration is a key element of performance. That means managers must understand which activities and competencies they can safely outsource and which they need to keep.
4. Bringing Open Innovation to Services
   By Henry Chesbrough
   In recent years, open innovation has been changing the way many companies think about developing products. But open innovation can — and should — apply to services, too.
5. Matchmaking With Math: How Analytics Beats Intuition to Win Customers
   Cameron Hurst, interviewed by Michael S. Hopkins and Leslie Brokaw
   In sales, the rapport between a prospective buyer and seller can be the deciding factor. Using analytics, Assurant Solutions has tripled its success. (A case-study interview.)
6. Big Data, Analytics and the Path From Insights to Value
   By Steve LaValle, Eric Lesser, Rebecca Shockley, Michael S. Hopkins and Nina Kruschwitz
   How the smartest organizations are embedding analytics to transform information into insight and then action. Findings and recommendations from the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive study.
7. Coming to a New Awareness of Organizational Culture
   By Edgar H. Schein
   If we really want to decipher an organization’s culture, this author claims that we must dig below the organization’s surface – beyond the “visible artifacts” – and uncover the basic underlying assumptions, which are the core of an organization’s culture. To do this, he provides a tool – a formal definition of organizational culture that emphasizes how culture works. With this definition in hand, the author feels that one cannot only come to understand the dynamic evolutionary forces that govern a culture, but also can explain how the culture is learned, passed on, and changed.
8. When Unhappy Customers Strike Back on the Internet
   By Thomas M. Tripp and Yany Grégoire
   Companies need to understand and manage the rising threat of online public complaining. There is ample incentive, because the best ways to respond, and to prevent complaints from recurring, apply not just to the Internet.
9. First Look: The Second Annual Sustainability & Innovation Survey
   By Knut Haanaes, Balu Balagopal, David Arthur, Ming Teck Kong, Ingrid Velken, Nina Kruschwitz and Michael S. Hopkins
   Is spending up or down? What does the C-suite think? Who’s ‘world-class?’ More than 3,000 managers responded. Here is an early sample of what they said.
10. Steve Jobs, the Way John Sculley Tells It
    By Michael S. Hopkins
    A quarter-century after the best-known romance and breakup in modern executive history, the partner who vanished has popped up with insights to share.