Making strategy behind closed doors results in copycat, unimaginative, and biased strategies that often fail. Opening up your strategy-making process to participants from outside the C-suite and outside your company offers leadership teams access to diverse sources of external knowledge, exposes cognitive biases, and builds the buy-in needed to speed execution. The authors describe the steps leaders must take to successfully implement open strategy at their companies.

Business models that unlock efficiency across entire networks are becoming increasingly common in the so-called sharing economy. However, the principles underlying these models can also be used in B2B settings. This article proposes some simple rules that managers can use in a systematic process to build similar disruptive business models. It illustrates these rules by deconstructing the go-to-market strategy that resulted in Vizio becoming the dominant flat panel TV vendor in the United States.

The sharing economy, a rising pattern in consumption behavior that is essentially based on accessing and reusing products to utilize idle capacity, presents both tremendous possibilities and significant threats for emerging as well as incumbent businesses. As of today, it is unclear whether this economy is merely another ephemeral trend in consumption or whether we are experiencing a real shift in how goods are accessed, distributed, and used. Furthermore, little is known about how existing business models are affected by the sharing economy. These two issues represent the central motivation for the development of this article. Consequently, an examination of why the sharing economy has the potential to produce a long-term transformation in consumption behavior is followed by a consideration of how this change might affect companies' business models. Based on a renowned business model framework and a variety of current illustrative examples, we propose central questions managers have to ask themselves in order to be prepared to respond to changes brought about by this new economic trend.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. How do consumers access, buy and use their favorite products and services? While individuals traditionally have seen ownership as the most desirable way, increasing numbers of consumers are paying to temporarily access or share products and services rather than buy or own them. This so-called "sharing economy"is growing rapidly, although estimates for the current size of the nascent market vary substantially. Well-known examples of successful startups built on collaborative consumption systems include Airbnb Inc. Growth in sharing systems has been particularly fueled by the Internet with its rise of social media systems, which facilitate connections between peers eager to share their possessions. The central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: obtain value from untapped potential residing in goods that are not entirely exploited by their owners. The sharing economy might represent a serious threat to established industries. However, the authors' research suggests six ways in which companies can respond: (1) by selling use of a product rather than ownership, (2) by supporting customers in their desire to resell goods, (3) by exploiting unused resources and capacities, (4) by providing repair and maintenance services, (5) by using collaborative consumption to target new customers, and (6) by developing entirely new business models enabled by collaborative consumption.

Crowdsourcing is typically associated with the incorporation of company-external stakeholders such as customers in the value creating process. This article proposes a framework for a company-internal application of crowdsourcing methods. It presents a set of five goals companies can pursue employing internal crowdsourcing. The practical approach of an Austrian medium-sized technology company is described in detail, including insights on software design and appropriate procedures.