Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2022 från MIT Sloan Management Review

Do you know who the innovators are in your organization? These aren’t just the creative product designers or the strategists devising new business models. They are also the people who make an end run around established processes, who lobby to do things differently, who proactively make connections across silos and build informal networks to get things done. Most of them aren’t in the C-suite. In fact, in researching the impact of organizational networks on cultural change, Peter Gray, Rob Cross, and Michael Arena found that the top 50 informal influencers at one organization had network ties with nearly twice as many employees as the top 50 senior leaders. Identifying and making allies of these game changers can help leaders who are finding it difficult to drive innovation in operations, the…

The biggest concerns over AI today are not about dystopian visions of robot overlords controlling humanity. Instead, they’re about machines turbocharging bad human behavior. Social media algorithms are one of the most prominent examples. Take YouTube, which over the years has implemented features and recommendation engines geared toward keeping people glued to their screens. As The New York Times reported in 2019, many content creators on the far right learned that they could tweak their content offerings to make them more appealing to the algorithm and drive many users to watch progressively more extreme content. YouTube has taken action in response, including efforts to remove hate speech. An independently published study in 2019 claimed that YouTube’s algorithm was doing a good job of discouraging viewers from watching “radicalizing or extremist…

HEALTHY BUSINESS GROWTH relies on a consistent pipeline of creative new ideas — and strategies for generating, cultivating, and operationalizing them. In this special report, we take an end-to-end look at how innovative ideas move from inspiration to implementation. Leaders can foster better conditions for innovation by first understanding what individuals and teams need in order to be their most creative and productive at each of the distinct phases of a new idea’s journey. Jill E. Perry-Smith dives into the interpersonal dynamics of this process, looking at how collaboration needs change as ideas advance from birth through elaboration and on to execution. Choosing which new ideas are the best bets to receive funding for further development is among the most important decisions that organizations can make — but Thorsten Grohsjean,…

Mercedes-Benz AG produces over 2 million passenger cars annually for a global market in the throes of transformation. Automakers are meeting new demands for electrification and connectivity, new competitors are arising, and customers have new expectations, such as the desire for sustainable mobility. All of these trends are driving the need to speed innovation in every facet of the automotive industry. In 2016, R&D and digital business managers at Mercedes’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, realized that their efforts to collaborate with startups — a valuable source of external innovation — were being hampered by the company’s existing innovation processes. Those processes were overly focused on internal development and ready-to-implement solutions provided by the company’s established base of suppliers and weren’t well suited to uncertaintyridden collaborations with promising technology startups. The…

Annual workforce demographic reports show that despite prominent high-tech companies’ pledges to increase gender diversity, the pattern of underrepresentation of women persists.1 Compared with workers in other industries, executives and professionals in the tech sector are disproportionately male.2 Women account for only 30% of the workforce in the top 75 technology companies in Silicon Valley, even though women achieve near parity at nontechnology businesses in the region.3 As a female technical consultant said in a 2018 Pew Research report on women in STEM: “People automatically assume I am the secretary, or in a less technical role, because I am female. This makes it difficult for me to build a technical network to get my work done. People will call on my male co-workers, but not call on me.”4 One of…

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HOLDS that the original objectives of management science were to promote economic efficiency and financial returns; the pursuit of goals loftier than moneymaking is seen as a recent development. But this isn’t the full picture. At its roots, the discipline is also closely aligned with current thinking about organizational purpose and managing with a broad community of stakeholders in mind. Today’s conversations about corporate social responsibility are not moving away from the principles of scientific management; they’re returning to them. Anyone who has studied management will likely have been taught that the field’s founder is the efficiency-obsessed Frederick Winslow Taylor. The notion attributed to Taylor — that economic efficiency is management’s fundamental principle — reigned in the 20th century and into the 21st. Administration expert Luther Gulick wrote…

The ongoing global supply chain crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shows no sign of abating. Widespread product shortages are focusing attention on supply chain issues as never before — and while this publicity has shed some light on the problem, it has also spawned (misguided) calls to end the practice of just-in-time inventory management. Multiple factors have led to the current situation, but they spring from two overarching causes: suppliers’ inability to adjust to soaring demand, and government interventions. In order to develop solutions to pandemicinduced product shortages, we need a better understanding of how these issues have played out since early 2020 and resulted in a worldwide logistics logjam. The Pandemic Effect As the pandemic took hold in March 2020, consumer demand patterns shifted abruptly. A shift to…

It can be a long slog from initial concept to final product. Even in organizations that pride themselves on rapid iteration and experimentation, most truly novel ideas either stall out at some point in development or lose their originality along the way. How do you defy those odds? By adjusting collaborative behavior to meet the idea wherever it is in its journey from mind to marketplace. That journey entails four phases: idea generation; concept elaboration through tests or prototypes that flesh out the idea and assess feasibility; internal promotion to get the sponsorship needed to move forward with a product; and implementation, which involves finalizing plans and specifications, creating the product, and delivering it. In my nearly 20 years researching creativity and innovation, I’ve found that as an idea progresses…

Swedish fashion giant H&M’s commitment to “operating with respect to human rights across the value chain” recently cost the company $74 million and the wrath of its third-biggest — and fastest-growing — market. In late 2020, H&M, along with other well-known fashion brands, publicly announced that it was no longer sourcing cotton from China’s Xinjiang region due to concerns over the use of forced labor among the country’s minority Uyghur population. When a website highlighted the announcement in March 2021, the Chinese consumer backlash was fierce. The company’s brands disappeared from Chinese e-commerce sites, landlords in parts of China forced many of the brand’s stores to close, and Chinese customs officials issued a warning alleging that H&M’s cotton dresses contained “dyes or harmful substances” that could endanger a child’s health.1…

In early 1962, an unknown band from Liverpool auditioned for Decca Records. The label rejected the band, saying, “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” About 18 months later, the Beatles would release their first album.1 The rest is history. The business world is full of anecdotes about businesses that passed on an idea that later became a huge success. The reverse is also true; in some cases, companies invest in promising ideas that prove disastrous. A famous example is Iridium Communications, a former division of Motorola that sought to market satellite phones broadly. After the company sent satellites into orbit in 1998, a host of issues prevented the business from gaining traction with customers, and the company filed for bankruptcy the next year.…

Everyone understands how important security is to digital products and services. Customers expect digital offerings to be secure, especially when they’re incorporating them into their own products and services. For example, a manufacturer that includes a sensor in its product design expects the sensor it uses to be cybersecure and not introduce vulnerabilities. Any device connected to the internet can create an entry point for attacks that access the internal system, steal credentials, plant malware, or collect sensitive data. But as breach after well-publicized breach shows, our development processes to build cybersecurity into products and services continue to break down. We have not yet reached the point where security is not only expected but deeply embedded in every aspect of product development. To build truly secure digital products and services…

How Collaboration Needs Change From Mind to Marketplace Jill E. Perry-Smith pp. 25-31 Key Insight: Deftly turning innovative new ideas into real offerings requires an understanding of the four stages they pass through — generation, elaboration, promotion, and implementation — and which kinds of collaboration are most effective in each phase. Top Takeaways: Most truly novel ideas either stall out in development or lose their originality along the way. To defy the odds, leaders need to help innovators collaborate in the right ways at the right times. Idea generation benefits from random, brief encounters, while elaboration works best with the support of close colleagues. Promotion — the process of gaining support and funding to develop a concept — is most effective when innovators can ally themselves with well-connected colleagues or…