Fostering innovation is not just about getting people to think differently. If you want to make innovation happen, you need to change the way people act or behave in their daily work. And the best way to do that is to change the environment they work in. This article will help managers take a new approach to the leadership role and think differently about how to foster innovation in their companies. The authors present five key behaviors, which they believe companies ought to foster in their employees. However, these are not enough on their own: A final piece of the innovation puzzle is to leverage the power of personal motivation, to get people to persist in these behaviors, making them an ingrained part of what they do. Only then can leaders make innovation happen in their everyday business.

More

As organizations grow increasingly reliant on a global workforce, they need to know how to mitigate time zone challenges. This is easier said than done: Coordinating your geographically and chronologically dispersed teams involves a lot more than better calendar planning or basic literacy about time differences, as important as these are. This article, based on 20 years of research on global working arrangements, explains how companies can not only mitigate the time zone problem but can use it as a source of competitive advantage.

More

From the corridors of political power to the boardroom, the ability to hold your own around the negotiating table is a vital element of success in today's world. Unfortunately, many negotiations end in deadlock. This is partly because many negotiators are unable to come up with creative, integrative deals, which research shows are a significant variable in reaching a conclusion satisfactory to both parties. Using a role-play-based experiment, the author observes 207 dyadic negotiations and discovers that a creative solution in a negotiation depends on the amount of creativity deployed in the tabling of the first offer and the resulting counteroffers. Most surprising, the creativity of the counteroffer appears to be the most significant variable influencing the success of the final deal. With that in mind, he proposes five strategies to help readers be more creative when they negotiate.

More

Companies communicate and operate across vast social and geographical spaces. The way that valuable knowledge is shared and transferred across these spaces is essential for creating and sustaining a healthy culture of innovation. To facilitate this, managers must look beyond formal organizational structures to the informal networks of ties and relationships that employees form across functions and divisions. Through his research, IESE Prof. Marco Tortoriello has identified a number of strategies for bolstering these informal networks. The first step is to institute boundary-spanning operations, which means identifying people within the organization who have the right set of features to serve as conduits for knowledge transfer within and between units. Next, the broader network context needs to be developed to support boundary-spanning outcomes. This means ensuring that the ties that link the company's informal networks are sufficiently strong and with appropriate range to channel vital knowledge between units. By far the most important step involves creating the "best" network conditions that will support the transfer of knowledge across different parts of the organization, which may facilitate better conditions for innovation.

More

With urbanization on the rise globally, failure to adapt to the new urban reality could be disastrous for cities facing unprecedented demographic, economic, social and environmental challenges. Development models are needed to transform such challenges into opportunities. The authors outline the strategic planning methodologies needed to create smart cities – sustainable, innovative, connected and socially cohesive places that enhance the quality of urban life. And when it comes to transforming cities, the private sector has plenty to contribute.

More

Given the sweeping changes happening across the business world with regard to more collaborative forms of learning and open innovation, companies are increasingly looking for better ways to foster new knowledge, seeing it as a key source of value creation and competitive advantage beyond the mere pursuit of profit maximization. Two decades since publishing his seminal book, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka revisits those theories and outlines a series of steps that companies and their leaders can take to create a more fertile environment for new knowledge creation, based on the Japanese concept of ba. What’s needed, he says, is nothing less than a completely new way of perceiving and executing the role of management.

More

While it’s understandable why some companies, like Facebook, might choose to go public at this stage of their growth, the IPO process itself is costly and time-consuming, and can transform a firm beyond recognition. Facebook’s lackluster debut, in May 2012, has only reinforced longstanding concerns that IPOs are primarily being used to enrich a select few within the investment banking community along with their most prized clients, often at the expense of the very companies that the banks are being paid to take public. This article discusses the motivations behind IPOs, how they work in practice, what companies can hope to gain from going public, and, just as importantly, the risks they might face by doing so. It also examines the current state of play in the IPO markets, as well as the possibility of another dot-com bubble taking shape.

More

Economic and demographic forecasts reveal the unsustainability of health-care systems in industrialized countries. The rising proportion of elderly and chronically ill people is putting serious pressure on existing systems, which were not designed to support long-term dependents. This situation makes current systems more inefficient and costly. Yet it also presents more opportunities for employment, entrepreneurship and improvements in the quality of care. This article identifies best practices in the organization and management of care services for chronic patients and elderly people, based on an ongoing transatlantic research project spearheaded by IESE. Changing the health-care model is multidimensional and cannot be reduced to the mere introduction of isolated formulas, such as copayment, say the authors. Instead, it requires comprehensive solutions. They recommend five key areas where efforts need to be focused: using valid and open indicators, creating legitimate jobs, developing better professional profiles, taking an integrated approach and involving everyone to make the overall system better and more efficient.

More

Culture, that intrinsic expression of humankind, has somehow grown remote from the general public. Arts and cultural institutions, just like their business counterparts, urgently need to find new audiences, meet changing demands and consider their business models afresh. The whole sector needs to reinvent itself, says the author. But how? Beatriz Muñoz-Seca recommends that arts and cultural institutions focus not so much on their products as on creating richer customer service experiences. To that end, she proposes the Service Activity Sequence – an operational framework for designing a customer experience and bringing several complementary players together to produce an integrated customer experience. Using various examples drawn from the author’s own research on arts and cultural institutions around the world, this article urges everyone to try new approaches, before today’s radically changing social and economic factors dictate the decline of our shared cultural patrimony.

More