| |
Popularity Contests: Why a Company Embraces One Innovative Idea but Shuns Another
Multinational corporations have a lot of good things going for them. They have built up a rich store of knowledge over the years, allowing their subsidiaries to share ideas and best practices in ways that smaller companies can only dream of. They also exploit their vast global reach and on-the-ground knowledge to sniff out new concepts or products being used by rival companies in other parts of the world. But these processes aren't always as successful as they could be. Felipe Monteiro, a Wharton professor of management whose recent research looks at how and when new knowledge gets the thumbs up within firms, explains why.
Publish Date: Dec 02, 2009
|
New Approaches to New Markets: How C.K. Prahalad's Bottom of the Pyramid Strategies Are Paying Off
Five years ago, C.K. Prahalad published a book titled, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, in which he argues that multinational companies not only can make money selling to the world's poorest, but also that undertaking such efforts is necessary as a way to close the growing gap between rich and poor countries. Key to his argument for targeting the world's poorest is the sheer size of that market -- an estimated four billion people. How has Prahalad's book -- a revised, fifth-anniversary edition of which has just been published -- affected the behavior of companies and the well-being of consumers in the years since its publication? Knowledge@Wharton checked in with the author for an update, including examples of specific companies that are implementing Bottom of the Pyramid strategies.
Publish Date: Nov 18, 2009
|
Injecting New Life into Old Business Models
When the economy gets tough, senior managers often put their companies under the microscope to identify where to cut or control costs that are dragging down the bottom line. Zeroing in on the minutiae of spending, however, may not be the best way to help a company's flagging performance. A better option: “Rather than cutting costs to preserve your bottom line, you can increase your top and bottom lines by finding new and novel ways to do business,” says Raphael Amit, a Wharton management professor who has co-written a new paper on business model innovation with Christoph Zott, a professor of entrepreneurship at IESE Business School.
Publish Date: Sep 23, 2009
|
How 'Go/No Go' Thinking Can Stop Innovation Dead in its Tracks
In Unlocking Opportunities for Growth: How to Profit from Uncertainty While Limiting Your Risk, authors Alexander B. van Putten and Ian C. MacMillan offer a tool they call Opportunity Engineering (OE), which shows companies how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities in order to pursue more high-payoff innovations. OE, the authors note, is both a tactical approach and a mindset. It provides a specific way of valuing opportunities, using proprietary software, that enables companies to plug in the parameters of a project and determine its potential quickly. In short, the authors say, OE helps inculcate a culture of innovation.
Publish Date: Jul 29, 2009
|
How Can You Find the Most Promising New Opportunities? Hold an Innovation Tournament
In their new book titled, Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional OpportunitiesRich rewards await companies that make the leap., Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich point out that identifying new opportunities shouldn't be seen as a luxury, but a necessity. They note that creativity and process-driven rigor can go hand in hand when it comes to vetting and managing new ideas. One way to do this, they explain, is by making new ideas compete with one another in numerous rounds of vetting -- that is, by running them through "innovation tournaments" -- so that the strongest and most promising ideas make it to the final round.
Publish Date: Jul 29, 2009
|
Ten Commandments from Entrepreneurial 'Evangelist' Guy Kawasaki
Venture capitalist, consultant and former Apple software "evangelist" Guy Kawasaki talked about "the art of innovation" during a recent visit to the University of Pennsylvania. He offered 10 rules for entrepreneurs and innovators. Among them: Make meaning, not money.
Publish Date: Jul 29, 2009
|
Innovation: Sometimes It Takes a Village
Companies have formed alliances and strategic partnerships for hundreds of years, but experts gathered for a recent conference at Wharton's Mack Center for Technological Innovation said such connections are more important than ever in a fast-changing business environment. Still, because more innovation networks fail than succeed, companies may have to alter their culture to make these critical alliances work.
Publish Date: Jul 01, 2009
|
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk: 'Great Companies Are Built on Great Products'
Entrepreneur Elon Musk has three passions: the Internet, space exploration and clean energy. The first paid off handsomely for him in 2002 when he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. The second is fueled by SpaceX, a company that makes space launch vehicles. Musk's third passion is Tesla Motors, which makes the Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car that claims to go 244 miles per charge and sells for $101,500 or more. In the first of a two-part interview with Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs and Knowledge@Wharton, Musk speaks with management professor John Paul MacDuffie, co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program, about electric cars, hybrids, the Tesla and the mysterious ways of Detroit.
Publish Date: May 20, 2009
|
The Brazilian Bioplastics Revolution
The production of plastics from renewable sources constitutes the next frontier in the search for ways to ease our dependency on oil and reduce our environmental footprint. The country at the forefront of these developments, however, is not commonly perceived as being a technology powerhouse. Yet Brazil is leading the way in this industry after decades of research and commitment to a technology based on sugarcane ethanol. The technology has proven to be environmentally sustainable -- and may even change the way we manufacture everything from personal care products to cars.
Publish Date: May 15, 2009
|
Making Robots More Like Us
While military uses have tended to dominate commercial development of autonomous robots in America, the business opportunities for smart robots are also sizable, according to Daniel Lee, an engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Lee, who recently spoke about the future of robotics as part of the Executive Master's in Technology Management program, has an ambitious goal: to learn how to make robots think and act like humans.
Publish Date: Apr 08, 2009
|
|
|
|
