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Rede Alta Velocidade, SA RAVE, the state-owned company responsible for planning and developing a major high-speed rail project in Portugal, must persuade both public officials and lenders that the project is worth undertaking. It must also make a recommendation on the appropriate organizational form for the enterprise. Specifically it must determine the role of the Portuguese government in financing and operating the high-speed rail network, with options ranging from full development and management of the project by the public sector to completely private development and management. Lying in between these two polar cases were a variety of hybrid models often referred to as public-private partnerships (PPPs). Using data in the case, students have the opportunity to perform a benefit-cost analysis of the project. They also must think carefully about the optimal role of the government in a major new infrastructure project.

In December 2010, one U.S. legislative action was largely overlooked in the popular press: the one-year extension of the 45-cent-per-gallon Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), commonly known as the "blender's credit." Both proponents and opponents of the blender's credit liked to cite data to support their positions. Proponents pointed out the number of jobs created by new ethanol plants, while opponents cited unfavorable energy balances from the use of ethanol and the overall budgetary impact of the blender's credit. What was less clear-but potentially much more important than the selective data cited by advocates and critics of ethanol-was the overall impact of the blender's credit on the U.S. economy. In particular, to what extent did the ethanol subsidy-by influencing the allocation of resources to the ethanol market-act as a drag on efficiency in the U.S. economy? This case presents a history of ethanol in the U.S. and an overview of the market for ethanol-based motor fuel, including data on demand and supply fundamentals. It also discusses the broader U.S. energy market, as well as the U.S. market for corn. The case reviews other policy interventions besides the ethanol tax credit that have an impact on the market for ethanol-based motor fuel, such as tariffs and mandates. Finally, it surveys the ways other countries around the world, such as Brazil, have supported the use of ethanol-based fuel.

The authors argue that today's leaders suffer from a common logical fallacy: they tend to see what they want to see and don't ask the harder questions that might lead in other directions. As a result, they fall victim to their own thinking -- to a willingness to 'mash together' competing logics without giving it a second thought. The remedy, they argue, is to dig deeper into the logic of opposing choices, to test your assumptions and explicitly seek to understand the ways in which conditions and consequences are linked. They explain how 'integrative thinkers' explicitly use the tensions between opposing ideas to generate new and better solutions.

Most of the problems we face in life are ill-defined, in that uncertainty is inherent not only in whether the goal can be reached, but in how best to conceive of the current state and the goal state. To deal effectively with such 'wicked' problems, the authors argue that thinkers must know how to develop a problem formulation that transforms the ill-defined problem into a well-defined one that can be tackled. Two widely researched approaches to achieving this are convergent thinking and divergent thinking. While these remain important, the authors argue that they are not sufficient to solve ill-structured problems. They propose that a third skill is imperative: the ability to 'break frame'. They describe all three of these thinking skills and show how a certain type of problem - the insight problem -- can be used to encourage the ability to break frame.

Leaders often focus on gaining employees' intellectual acceptance of a new strategy and view this as an early milestone in successful implementation. The problem is, this approach isn't working very well: study after study demonstrates that the 'knowing-doing gap' is alive and well, and that many carefully-constructed strategies continue to be ignored or dismissed by the employees whose behavior must change in order to make them work. The author argues that feeling strategy must accompany knowing it. She explains what it means to 'feel' strategy -- to experience it in an emotional as well as a cognitive way, and describes the four key components of fostering strategy as experienced in your organization.

In this interview, the author argues that 'winner's brains' - the brains of highly successful individuals in a wide range of fields -- operate quite differently than the average brain. He describes the five 'brain power tools' that are characteristic of the winner's brain, including an 'opportunity radar' and a 'goal laser'. He also explains how we can all take better care of our brains throughout our lives and work toward developing a winner's brain.

The author argues that the emerging discipline of Business Design requires a particular combination of mindsets, methods and thinking skills that exercise the 'whole brain' and help develop a well-rounded capacity for agile thinking and adaptive doing. She explains how a combination of the right mindset (being) and a rigorous methodology (doing) unlock a person's thinking and describes six skills under each of the three headings (being/doing/thinking) that foster bilateral thinking and create a platform for enterprise success.

Is our memory involved in the development of new insights? If so, in what ways? In this article the author attempts to connect the dots between memory and insight -- two thought processes that are normally treated independently. In so doing, he shows that the connecting thread among the dots involves the 'making of meaning', and that the needle for weaving the connecting thread is the concept of co-creation. A better understanding of this, he argues, can deepen our knowledge about consumer behavior and improve research methods and marketing practice.

Is your fund manager's sudden bullishness the result of some special insight, or is it the result of the torrid love affair he is engaged in providing a hormonal charge to his perception of the facts? Is your chairman's congratulatory smile addressed at you, or, rather, to the other people around the table, whom he intends to see him smiling at you so that they don't think he bears you a grudge - which, unfortunately, he actually does? Welcome to the ZOO -- the Zone Of Oblivion, both yours and that of others. The ZOO is a special place: it comprises all of the facts, feelings and experiences that make a huge difference to you and your business, but which you neither know about, nor know that you don't know. The author provides guidance for thriving in this murky, ambiguous - yet entirely human environment.

'Synthesis' is defined as a process or result of building up separate elements, especially ideas, into a connected whole. The author argues that this is an essential element of the skill of designing everything from products to services to strategies. He proposes that synthesis consists of two key stages: sensemaking and framing, describing in detail how each works. A better understanding of these concepts, he argues, will lead to the emergence of a professional methodology for 'innovation by design'.

While a master chef or painter may welcome the freedom and flexibility associated with an enlarged set of options, does the average person benefit from more choice during problem solving? The authors show how the increased complexity inherent in increased options affects people and describe the research that led them to conclude that both individual and situational factors play a role in influencing creativity. They identify two important variables that managers must pay attention to in the quest for creative outcomes.

While there are many roads to innovation, there is reason to believe that it often arises from the adaptation of known solutions to new problem domains. The good news is that people have a remarkable facility to make analogies - to notice similarities between domains that, on the surface, are not much alike. The authors argue that this ability to make analogical inferences is crucial to problem solving. When solving any new problem, the problem statement is only a partial match to the known solutions; the key to analogical problem solving is to find known problems that have the same structure as the problem being solved. The authors describe how to improve our 'analogical retrieval' and provide several tools for analogical innovation.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In industry after industry, managers have taken deliberate steps to separate their value chains and shift important activities and functions to outside suppliers. But what happens when companies become too dependent on outside suppliers and cede them too much control when they lack the same degree of understanding and awareness about how important product or service elements fit together and what's necessary? How can they go about reestablishing critical internal levers? These questions arose during a multiyear research project examining supply strategy relating to new product development at a major European automotive company. In the late 1980s, the company -the authors call it Alpha -had direct supply relationships with more than 3,000 suppliers, most of them small companies that were involved in component production. In the early 1990s, however, management began shifting increasing amounts of design and engineering work to suppliers -a trend that was hastened by the proliferation of electronics in cars. By the mid-1990s, Alpha began to outsource the design of complete systems, such as dashboards, seats and safety systems. Alpha management hoped to increase flexibility, reduce lead times and cut development costs while improving product quality. But as the internal engineering teams got smaller and less up to date on the specific design and technical issues, problems emerged with integrating systems and making decisions about trade-offs. The article examines the difference between integrating physical systems and integrating the performance of such systems. The authors found that successful new product development depends on three main factors: component-specific knowledge; learning by doing; and technological renewal. Modular product architecture may make good sense for dealing with physical integration, but it is not adequate for resolving issues of performance.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The increase in outsourcing and offshoring of complex work has resulted in innovation efforts that require coordination across cultural, geographic and legal boundaries. If that coordination is mishandled, companies can find themselves needing to make multimillion- or even billion-dollar changes. The authors show how problems often arise along the boundaries between organizations and activities -with the likelihood of trouble increasing with the complexity of the work being done. Then they provide guidance on how to define boundaries. Specifically: What activities to combine/ separate; what should be in-sourced or outsourced; and what to onshore or offshore. Once boundaries have been established, the authors explain how they can be spanned by rules, technology and people. Even so, the complexity of the task makes midcourse corrections likely. Managers must anticipate and adapt their processes in order to reduce risk and, ultimately, cost.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Historically, most managers equated innovation primarily with the development of new products and new technologies. But increasingly, innovation is seen as applying to the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans and routes to market, as well as new management practices. There is now a greater recognition that novel ideas can transform any part of the value chain -and that products and services represent just the tip of the innovation iceberg. This shift of focus has implications for who "owns"innovation. It used to be the preserve of a select band of employees -be they designers, engineers or scientists -whose responsibility it was to generate and pursue new ideas, often in a separate location. But increasingly, innovation has come to be seen as the responsibility of the entire organization. For many large companies, in fact, the new imperative is to view innovation as an "all the time, everywhere"capability that harnesses the skills and imagination of employees at all levels. Making innovation everyone's job is intuitively appealing but very hard to achieve, but many companies have tried -and nearly all believe that's it's critical to continue trying. To understand these challenges, and to identify the innovation practices that work, the authors spent three years studying the process of innovation in 13 global companies. Many of the standard arguments for how to encourage innovation in large organizations were confirmed, but some surprises were uncovered as well. In this article the authors focus on the key insights that emerged from their research, organized around five persistent "myths"that continue to haunt the innovation efforts of many companies. The five myths are: (1) The Eureka Moment; (2) Built It and They Will Come; (3) Open Innovation Is the Future; (4) Pay Is Paramount; and, (5) Bottom Up Innovation Is Best.

In earlier work, the author has argued for the concept of open innovation -that companies should both organize their innovation processes to be more open to external knowledge and ideas and also let more of their ideas and knowledge flow to the outside when not being used internally. Yet initial discussion of open innovation contrasted it to traditional R&D and product development; this had the effect of placing the focus more on product and technology innovation than on service innovation. Open innovation works somewhat differently in service businesses, in part because the role of the customer is different; in a service business, the customer is often involved in an iterative process with the company that results in a customer experience. In addition, innovation processes work differently in services. Few companies have formal R&D operations for the services they provide, and the customer may need to participate throughout the service innovation process. Some of the concepts of open innovation apply readily to service innovation. For example, Amazon. com has not only created open service innovation by bringing the "outside in"-think of customer reviews on Amazon.com and third parties selling products via Amazon's site -but also by taking the"inside out,"by, for example, using internal knowledge and infrastructure to create a business selling cloud computing services to other companies. Companies interested in moving toward open service innovation can try techniques such as working closely with customers to develop new solutions for them; focusing offerings on utility for customers, rather than on products; and embedding the company in a customer's organization. Companies that have traditionally been product oriented may need to make some organizational changes, such as changing service pricing, as they move to a more service-oriented approach.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. MIT Sloan Management Review's second annual Sustainability & Innovation survey -exploring the current and projected sustainability-related practices of organizations and executives -was fielded during a year of bad public news for sustainability advocates. Between last year's much-publicized delay in reaching an international agreement on climate change in Copenhagen and the continuing economic malaise, it was hard to predict how sustainability would fare as a management priority. Would companies begin to scale back their efforts to adopt more efficient business practices and become less focused on sustainability-related issues? Would they put existing programs on hold? What assessments would they make about the implications for managers of the changing sustainability landscape, and how were their strategic plans for competing in the future being affected by sustainability concerns? This article is a first look at the results of the 2010 Sustainability & Innovation Executive Study -focusing especially on 12 top-line observations drawn from the survey data and separate in-depth executive interviews. The survey respondents included more than 3,107 managers and executives, representing every major industry and region of the world. This article offers answers to such questions as, Where does sustainability now fit on top management's agenda? Do top-performing companies see things differently? Who drives the agenda within companies? What does the C-suite think? And how do top managers go about making sustainability-related investment decisions when tangible information for weighing costs and benefits is often lacking?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of business analytics, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted a survey of more than 3,000 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations located around the world. The survey was part of the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project, which attempts to understand better how all organizations are trying to capitalize on information and apply analytics today and in the future. One of the most significant findings is that there is a clear connection between performance and the competitive value of analytics. Survey respondents who agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated them were twice as likely to be top performers. Three stages, or capability levels, of analytics adoption emerged from the research: aspirational, experienced and transformed. The article provides a comprehensive description of each, enabling organizations to identify where they fall in the continuum. In addition, the authors include suggestions for the best entry points and techniques for each level, and measures to avoid the most common pitfalls. Based on insights from the survey, case studies and interviews with experts, the authors also describe an emerging five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management and rapidly creating value -as leading businesses are already managing to do. These include (1) focus on the biggest and highest data priorities, (2) within each of those priorities, start by asking questions, not by looking at the available data, (3) embed insights into business processes to make them more understandable and actionable, (4) keep existing capabilities and tools while adding new ones and (5) develop an overarching information agenda that enables decision making and strategy for the future.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center -operationally optimized, "skills-routed,"managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. "We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books."They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn't quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

During the recession, companies like Procter & Gamble, Hyundai, and Best Buy used adaptive pricing strategies, such as introducing lower-priced versions of products and adapting products to maintain affordability, to avoid across-the-board price cuts that can be difficult to reverse later. Now, as we wait for the economy to return to full speed, smart companies will learn from these strategies and develop plans to help their own businesses regain lost ground.