The founder and CEO of Viking Range recalls the eventful words of an early adviser: "You should run this from day one like it's a public company. Treat it like it's going to be big." He did, and it was.

Many companies still overlook the virtues of electronic invoice and payment systems: Some 70% of U.S. business-to-business transactions involve paper invoices and checks, and managing them costs about $116 billion a year. Electronic systems can help cut accounts payable overhead by more than 50%--but suppliers need to be converted quickly.

Executives can delineate their corporate strategy with three simple circles: one for what customers value, one for how customers perceive the company's offerings, and one for how customers perceive competitors' offerings. The overlap (or lack thereof) will provide valuable insights.

A "reverse logistics" value chain strategy--what you do with goods your customers send back--can strengthen your company's competitiveness according to the authors of a recent article in the "Academy of Management Perspectives." Estee Lauder built a $250-million product line from returned cosmetics.

The CEO of the British Library explains how the United Kingdom's exclusive repository for rare books, manuscripts, and scientific papers has loosened up the design of its Business & IP Centre to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.

Arresting thieves and investing in technology, the main approaches to retail loss prevention, haven't managed to diminish it over the past 15 years. A study of companies that have successfully reduced shrinkage uncovers nine practices behind their success, beginning with organizational and senior management commitment to making loss prevention a priority.

After three straight years of decline, movie theaters in the US may have recently ended a period of crisis with an increase in annual admissions (+3%) in 2006. This articles argues, however, that major problems are not over for the industry. Most movie theaters in the multiplex era have adopted a remarkable similar strategy, one which is also very vulnerable to recent trends such as the explosion of home cinema, pay TV, video-on-demand (VOD), discounting by Mass merchandisers of DVDs, computer games, and the collapse of video windows. Just as technological convergence has created a challenge for movie theaters, as it has in the past, so too can new technologies and creative use of assets (combined with multiple target marketing) offer a counter measure for at least some movie theaters; at least so many multiplexes offer the same format as their competitors, appear to adopt a narrow definition of what business they are in, and manifest a 'one-size-should-fit-all' approach to customers, The industry has employed differentiation and niche marketing much less than other industries. As the extensive variety of necessary strategies cannot comprehensively be explored herein, this article focuses on two new technologies from the IMAX corporation, DMX and MPX, as an example of how a theater operator might counter audience declines.

In order to be successful in attracting trading volume and generate revenue from trading fees, exchanges must allow potential traders to transact quickly at a known price. This is known as providing liquidity. On the New York Stock Exchange, liquidity comes from two sources: traders conducting business on the floor of the exchanged and those who electronically send orders to the exchange from off-floor locations. On-floor traders have traditionally been alleged to have advantages over off-floor traders. If that is the case, then this might discourage off-floor traders from providing liquidity and reduce the efficiency of security markets. We find that on-floor traders do seem to enjoy some advantages in providing liquidity, although the differences are not great. This suggests that the New York Stock Exchange is warranted in several of its recent initiatives designed to level the playing field between on- and off-floor traders.

A brand strategy can be critical to the success of an innovation, particularly in the long term. There are times when a firm literally needs to brand an innovation or lose it. Without a successful branding strategy, an innovation can be short-lived--diffusing into a confused marketplace with its impact dissipated--or become another forgotten internal initiative. In such cases, branding can make all the difference. Branding, it should be emphasized, does not mean simply putting a name and logo on an innovation. Rather, it means making the brand an integral part of a coherent strategy, supported by actively managed and adequately funded brand-building programs. However, not all innovations merit such a program and over-branding can pose business risks.

There is a generic innovation process, grounded in models of how people learn, that can be applied across multiple sectors. It can be applied to the design and development of both hardware and software products, to the design of business models and services, to the design of organizations and how they work, and to the design of the buildings and spaces in which work takes place or within which companies interact with their customers. Describes such a model of innovation, grounding it in learning models and developing its implications for understanding, implementing, and engaging in the innovation process. Focuses on the value and functions of multifaceted innovation teams, notes the difficulties inherent in innovation efforts, shows where some of the pitfalls are for organizations attempting to innovate, and emphasizes the need to be flexible and adaptive in using the innovation process.

The increasing adoption of more open approaches to innovation fits uneasily with current theories of business strategy. Traditional business strategy has guided firms to develop defensible positions against the forces of competition and power in the value chain, implying the importance of constructing barriers rather than promoting value creation through openness. Recently, however, firms and even whole industries, such as the software industry, are experimenting with novel business models based on harnessing collective creativity through open innovation. The apparent success of some of these experiments challenges prevailing views of strategy. At the same time, many of these experimenters now are grappling with issues related to value capture and sustainability of their business models, as well as issues of corporate influence and the potential co-option of open initiatives. These issues bring us back to traditional business strategy, which can offer important insights. To make strategic sense of innovation communities, ecosystems, networks, and their implications for competitive advantage, a new approach to strategy--open strategy--is needed. Open strategy balances the tenets of traditional business strategy with the promise of open innovation.

The belief that there is a positive link between quality and innovation is widely shared among quality professionals. Yet the experience of Japanese manufacturing firms, who are well known for their high standards of quality performance, casts doubt upon this relationship. In fact, the inability of some Japanese high-technology firms to introduce radical and disruptive new technologies is in part due to the emphasis they have placed on product quality. By delaying the introduction of new technologies until their quality could be assured, they lost out to American firms who were willing to introduce new products and service features that met the needs of consumers, even though they were not free from deficiencies, such as Apple's iPod. Uses three major case studies from the Japanese high-tech sector to analyze what kinds of innovation might be undermined by a focus on quality and explores its managerial implications.

The innovation process occurs in two ways--the Corporate Model and the Entrepreneurship Model. Corporations have many competitive advantages that they can use to succeed against startups. In a one-on-one competition, the startup usually has less capital, fewer scientists and engineers, less legitimacy or brand presence, fewer strategic alliances, evolving organizational structures, and incomplete or even non-existent business processes. Young firms have the liabilities of newness and smallness, so they fail at higher rates than do their larger and older competitors. However, the structural and managerial advantages associated with established companies also disadvantage them. Innovation requires two important underlying conditions. First, resources must be mobile. Second, incentives must be aligned so that those who provide these resources, especially financial resources, succeed along with innovators who are engaged in risky activities that generally require extraordinary levels of effort. When resources are immobile, and incentives are misaligned, the innovation process in established firms slows. Under these circumstances, entrepreneurs can start companies, develop the capabilities of those companies, and bring new products to market relatively quickly.

As firms strive to lead through innovation, they face the twin challenges of how to unify seemingly contradictory perspectives. The first is the desire to bring genuinely new products to market and follow a "market-driven" approach to product development, which often tends to be conservative in nature. The second is avoiding the "innovator's dilemma," or becoming the prisoner of a once-but-no-longer successful technology due to the emergence of an apparently "disruptive" newer technology. Presents a framework for helping organizations simultaneously deal with these two issues, which are rooted in the understanding that while firms may produce a set of (technical) features, consumers purchase benefits. However, since most benefits are generic in nature, the core "technologies" on which innovations are based--what we describe as meta-technologies--are also generic in nature. By focusing their efforts on meta-technologies, firms can be innovative while remaining sensitive to customer needs and simultaneously be market-driven and "market-driving." This perspective offers a potential solution to the "innovator's dilemma," since at the benefit level technologies are rarely disruptive, but rather "continuous" and evolutionary. Firms that seeks to develop successful and sustainable strategies for innovation must identify these generic, or "meta-technologies," and then design and deliver new products that are based on them.

New product innovation is a strategic business activity that involves significant financial resources and managerial attention. Most new product launches fail because existing methods are unable to forecast their commercial success accurately. Describes a market-based method to address this gap. This method capitalizes on the power of the "wisdom of crowds" by allowing people to interact in organized markets governed by well defined rules. These markets motivate people to share information freely through a price discovery process. Prediction markets seek information aggregation from a large group of diverse individuals by encouraging active participation. Demonstrates the power of the markets with real application examples from a wide variety of industries.

With the controversy surrounding Larry Summers' comments about innate differences between men and women as a backdrop, examines whether and when gender differences exist in the competitive negotiation arena. Reviews research that documents the impact of negotiators' beliefs and motivations on performance, focusing on gender stereotypes and their message regarding women's inability to perform on a par with their male counterparts in business dealings. Documents the distinct performance impact of stereotypes that operate below the threshold of consciousness versus stereotypes that are out in the open, and specifically explores gender stereotypes in the context of the broader issue of bargaining power. Such stereotypes affect both objective and subjective power at the bargaining table. After providing insights into the way that gender stereotypes operate, identifies strategies for mitigating their potentially harmful effects and instead uses them to encourage performance gains.

Innovation is as important in services as it is in manufacturing. However, competing on innovation in services demands a different organizational approach. Relative to innovation in manufacturing, innovation in services has five distinctive characteristics--it is: distributed throughout the organization; fluid, that is, more continuous than discrete; broadly relevant to hiring and promotion decisions; influenced by reward systems and culture at the firm-wide level; and enabled by leadership. The foundations--both cultural and structural--for competing on innovation in services must operate pervasively throughout the organization. Examines innovation in investment banking and discusses its implications for competing on innovation in other service industries.

One primary difference between the online marketplace and the high street is the quality of information about product characteristics and prices that are available to all consumers and retailers. Successful online retailers exploit this rich information through innovative dynamic pricing strategies. Identifies important considerations for devising online pricing strategies, presents five case studies that illustrate how these strategies have been applied by successful online retailers, and discusses complementary practices in innovative management and data analysis. Also presents a 'Dashboard' of market-specific information that will help managers identify and respond to opportunities and threats arising in the online marketplace.

The global semiconductor industry is undergoing several forms of structural change simultaneously. The structure of market demand is shifting from one dominated by personal computers to a more diverse array of heterogeneous niches, largely resulting from global diffusion of the Internet and wireless communications applications. The structure of manufacturing activities is shifting from one dominated by "integrated device manufacturers" (IDMs), which both design and manufacture semiconductor components, to one characterized by vertical specialization, where many firms specialize in either design and marketing ("fabless" firms) or manufacturing ("foundries"). Finally, market demand and technical expertise are growing in geographic regions (e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, and the People's Republic of China) that formerly were much less prominent actors in the global industry. In the face of such far-reaching structural change in the industry, it is surprising that most indicators of the "globalization" of innovation-related activities in the U.S. semiconductor industry--ranging from publicly available data on the share of industry-funded R&D that is performed offshore to the location of inventive activity associated with patenting by U.S. firms--indicate only modest offshore movement in key innovation-related activities. To a surprising extent, this evidence suggests that much of the innovation process in this global industry remains "non-globalized."

Internal or contractual production of highly creative products requires managers to assess both unobservable effort and uncertain output, leading to lack of cost control. Similarly, in procuring creative products in the marketplace, managers face the unavoidable winner's curse risk. Since this risk is, to a large extent, independent of the creative nature of the product, the higher the creative content, the higher the relative hazards associated with internal or contractual production. Thus, internal/contractual production of creative goods will tend to be less prevalent the higher the creative content associated with its production. The evolution of the U.S. film industry in the mid-20th century provides examples and implications for managing highly creative activities and ventures.