Giving people time and resources to pursue innovation projects can produce extraordinary outcomes — but only if you match your “slack strategy” to employee type. The authors found that different types of employees respond in different ways to slack innovation programs; that different kinds of slack resources are better suited to certain types of employees than others; and that different kinds of slack innovation programs produce different kinds of innovation.

Barbara Goose, CMO at John Hancock, cites thinking like a startup and encouraging employees to pursue “hybrid roles” as key to the organization’s successes at digital transformation.

Lindsay Sutton, AVP and digital strategy lead at John Hancock Financial Services, Inc. talks with MIT SMR guest editor Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane about the mindset required to prioritize digital transformation.

Many of today’s most successful companies are able to leverage business model scalability to achieve profitable growth. Executives need to factor scalability attributes into their business model design or they risk being left behind.

Not every company can be built around exceptional talent or exclusive technology. Instead, companies also can thrive by the innovative use of ordinary resources, such as well-managed staffs and competent websites. As management scholars Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett once wrote: “The key function of management is to help ordinary people produce extraordinary results.” The authors examine how business models leveraging regular resources will take different approaches than those focused on scarce strategic resources.

If political and ideological boundaries really are “invisible fences in the mind,” as MIT Sloan professor John Sterman puts it, then what kind of image of how the world works will best serve us as we think about issues of economic growth? These are some of the questions that MIT Sloan’s Jason Jay raised in a thought-provoking presentation at the Dynamics of Globalization Executive Education program held at MIT on June 13-14.

Police in Santa Cruz, California, are using a computer program to predict where burglaries and other crimes might take place based on past events and forecasting, and using that information to deploy resources more intelligently.

Earth Day is being celebrated today, April 22, with events on the MIT campus, in cities such as Minneapolis and Austin, and in Pittsburgh, where a program (online at pittsburghwed.com) plans 6 weeks of events about water issues between now and June 5′s World Environment Day.

There has been “nothing less than a revolution in water use” in the U.S. writes Charles Fishman in the new “The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water,” with companies now tracking their water use, reporting it publically, and reimagining it.

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.

Advances in development tools have tremendous potential for increasing productivity, cost savings and innovation. To reap the full benefits of such technologies, though, companies need to avoid some common pitfalls.