New products and technologies often fail to depose inferior ‘incumbents’. (The classic example is the Dvorak keyboard, which, despite being more efficient, lost out to the original QWERTY model in the 1930s.) New products and technologies of equal strengths often go on to win unequal shares of the market. The dynamics of competition are complex. […]
Read More… from Why Inferior Innovations Often Beat the Best
In many organizations, IT is managed via a Chief Information Officer (CIO), who is given a budget and mandate and simply left to ‘get on with it!’ This may be because CEOs and boards want to concentrate on what they would consider as their core business and IT is just viewed as another business function, like […]
Read More… from IT Leadership: Shifting Mindsets to Add Value
Investment banking was once regulated mainly by ‘reputational incentives’: bankers were motivated to act in the client’s best interests by concern for the bank’s good name. It was a system that owed as much to pragmatism as integrity. Contracts relied on the honest exchange of information (about, for example, the quality of securities) and the […]
Read More… from Investment Banking: Technology and the Decline of Trust
The ‘lure of the virtual’ has led many organizations to believe that one day not too far away, we will be able to accomplish with computers what has historically only been done physically. Already, the idea of working virtually has moved well away from the realm of science fiction to reality for many organizations around […]
Read More… from How Virtual Ways of Working Impact on Team Productivity
Crowdsourcing is an expression that describes the act of taking a task once performed by an internal employee or team, and outsourcing it to a large, undefined group of people external to the company. With the need for innovation being a top priority for businesses today, many have turned to crowdsourcing in an attempt to […]
What drives customers’ attitudes and behaviours? This is the golden question for marketing executives, who often rely on data from surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc., in the hopes of trying to understand how to better influence their customers. But according to Emma Macdonald, Hugh Wilson and Umut Konu?, these types of data suffer from a […]
Discontinuous technologies refers to when new products are created that end up transforming existing markets, such as cloud computing, digital photography, 3D printing, online news, etc. Not surprisingly, they often pose a critical challenge for executives, and how they deal with such major paradigm shifts has formed the basis of a number of recent articles. […]
Read More… from Organizational Identity and Adaptation to Disruptive Change
The type and amount of information collected by organizations today is on a scale never seen before. This explosion in the volume of data received through sources such as social media feeds, customer service databases, etc., has created a new opportunity for businesses to compete by collecting and analysing this so called “big data.” And […]
There has been a large increase in employees working from home in recent years; in the US alone, over 10% of the workforce now report regular home-working. But there is still a lack of research into such arrangements and the long-term effects they have on an organization. In this Idea, researchers examined the results of […]
Read More… from Home Working: Does it Work for the Organization?
Though product/process innovation has become a necessity for many companies, the time and expenses required is now leading hesitant companies to turn towards business model innovation instead. So what do executives need to know about it? Business model innovation matters to managers, entrepreneurs and academic researchers for several reasons. First, it represents an often underutilized […]
