Blockchain technologies are quickly changing the competitive business landscape. Companies need to think strategically about how best to prepare for a future in which they might systematically enhance value and unleash new value using blockchain. In this article, we address how cooperating companies jointly create unique value with blockchain technology, the risks they face along the way, and how they can mitigate those risks. We briefly identify three different reasons a company might adopt blockchain: to enhance value creation, to strengthen existing value ecosystems, or to create new value ecosystems. Then, we identify three strategic risks of blockchain adoption as they relate to business issues, legal issues, and technological issues. Finally, we highlight four different strategic maneuvers for minimizing these risks. The strategic maneuvers include the all-industry approach, the walled-garden approach, the many-gardens approach, and the options approach. We provide prescriptive advice to managers on how to strategically think about blockchain adoptions, how to identify the underlying risks, and how to consider strategic approaches to mitigate their adoption risk.

New research shows that organizations seeking innovative ideas from crowdsourcing platforms can gain more responses to their problem statements by engaging contributors' imaginations while not limiting their creativity. The authors suggest five best practices for using crowdsourcing sites: personalizing the problem, challenging solvers to surpass the status quo, explaining customer needs, asking engaging questions, and highlighting tensions to be resolved.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As organizations search for better solutions to their everyday problems, many are encouraging employees to use their experiences to develop new ideas and play a more active role in the innovation process. Companies including AT&T Inc., Google Inc., and Deutsche Telekom AG have turned to what's known as internal crowdsourcing. Although external crowdsourcing, which solicits ideas from consumers, suppliers, and anyone who wants to participate, has been widely studied, internal crowdsourcing, which seeks to channel the ideas and expertise of the company's own employees, is less well-understood. However, as the authors point out, harnessing the cognitive diversity within organizations can open up rich new sources of innovation while at the same time engaging younger employees and people working on the front lines. In this article, the authors examine the benefits of internal crowdsourcing and the common roadblocks to participation, collaboration, and implementation; they draw on their research at a number of companies, including a health care company, a telecommunications company, and fashion and retail company Li & Fung Ltd. The authors present a set of action steps to help executives make their internal crowdsourcing efforts more effective. Those steps include: (1) keeping the focus broadly on long-term innovation rather than short-term problem-solving; (2) giving employees slack time to participate; (3) allowing for anonymous participation; and (4) making sure experts within the company don't exert too much influence. The authors also recommend that companies encourage collaboration, use technology platforms that connect individuals with ideas from other participants, and have well-defined procedures for how ideas will be handled after the crowdsourcing event.

Few CEOs of large companies leverage the power of Twitter to the fullest extent. As of September 2014, only 42 Fortune 500 CEOs had Twitter accounts. The authors argue that rather than waiting for impressions to be driven by the media or by individuals with ulterior motives, CEOs can use Twitter to help shape their public image and that of their companies. The authors studied the Twitter activity of 25 CEOs of publicly traded companies who were active on Twitter and identified common patterns and themes. Based on the type of content tweeted most often, the authors classified the CEOs they studied into four groups: Generalists, Expressionists, Information Mavens, and Business Mavens. Generalists used Twitter to share a wide range of content. At times they tweeted about personal opinions and interests; other times, they tweeted information closely related to the business (for example, strategy, existing products and services, customer references, etc.). However, on average they had the smallest networks among the groups of CEOs, perhaps because they were not sharing information that was unique. Expressionists used Twitter extensively for non-business content sharing. These CEOs shared their opinions about events and politics and gave their followers an insight into their daily lives. In many ways, they used Twitter as a brand-building platform for themselves as they do for their companies. Information Mavens frequently shared links to information, news, and other happenings. However, they did not generally tweet information specific to their company, acting more like curators of content. As a result, relatively few people retweeted or "favorited"their tweets. Business Mavens used Twitter extensively and primarily shared business-related content. In contrast to the other CEO groups that the authors identified, Business Mavens often shared new product announcements, information about existing products, customer references

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Many companies are trying to leverage the power of Twitter to connect with customers and promote their brands and products. The authors studied the marketing communication between 47 companies and their followers for about three months. Their research identifies factors that increase the likelihood of "retweeting"so that a company's tweets will be shared with recipients'networks and identifies which activities should not be pursued.<BR> <BR>Retweeting is desirable both because the original tweet reaches more people and because a retweet is essentially an endorsement from recipients to their followers. That said, since tweeting by companies is basically a marketing function, there are several practices that don't work well. The most important to avoid is blatant hard-sell messages. In addition, neither using hashtags nor embedding links increased retweeting. Finally, announcing contests or other promotional techniques also did not increase retweeting.<BR> <BR>The authors did find nine practices that increase retweetability, including keeping messages short so there is room for retweeters to add their own messages. Opening with an attention-grabbing headline is important, as is simply asking the recipient to pass the message on. Humanizing the brand has the highest likelihood of causing retweeting, increasing the odds by as much as 70%. The authors also suggest providing information that people can use and act on; offering a deal that can save people money; and making the message relevant and topical. And the best practice of all is when organizations combine several of these practices to get the most out of their marketing messages.<BR>

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually. The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity.