This article analyzes the connection between gamification and business success, focusing on customer retention, new customer acquisition, and transforming user perceptions. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis of 40 high-profile gamification projects, it shows that a combination of three key features-virtualization, social comparison, and tangible rewards-explain the various pathways to success. Each pathway requires the presence-and sometimes absence-of different design features, and firms do best when they focus on one or two objectives rather than all three at once. The article presents a framework for designing and implementing gamification more strategically and effectively, noting the ethical questions that arise.

Haier had come a long way since Zhang Ruimin took it over as a failing Chinese Collective-Owned Enterprise in 1984. Since then, he'd been able to transform it into one of the world's leading appliance manufacturers, known for quality and innovation. Haier was also noted for its bold geographical expansion, which had included buying iconic European brands, such as Candy, and, in 2016, the venerable General Electric Appliances (GEA), one of the world's most established white-goods firms. Along the way, Haier pioneered a new managerial philosophy: RenDanHeYi, a policy of staying close to the user (a term Haier preferred to "customer") where employees were encouraged to act as entrepreneurs and held accountable for their actions. More recently, it had put the digital agenda at the heart of its approach, leading a revolution in household appliances and aspiring to be the leading ecosystem brand in the Internet of Things (IoT) - a distinction duly conferred on it by BrandZTM in 2019.

Ecosystems offer a new way to bring multiple firms together in order to deliver new value propositions. By working together, the hub firm and its complementors can create innovative 'product plus service' bundles that span traditionally separate industries to offer an experience that simply wasn't available before. Such experiences can delight customers and give firms a powerful point of differentiation against competitors.

As industry boundaries dissolve and digitalization grows apace, ecosystems are becoming increasingly important. Yet for all the excitement and Big-Tech envy, there is little guidance for how to create ecosystems. How should a firm best engage? Should it become a partner to someone else's ecosystem, or build its own? Should it focus on a broad range of digitally connected services, or narrow down? How should we think about ecosystem value proposition, governance, and complementor choice? And, what is the case for investment in ecosystems? Drawing on recent research and projects with leading firms, this article offers a framework for understanding, engaging in, and building business ecosystems.

Even in severe economic downturns and recessions, some companies are able to gain advantage. In the past four downturns, 14% of large companies increased both their sales growth rate and their EBIT margin. A shock like the Covid-19 pandemic can produce lasting changes in customer behavior. To survive and thrive in a crisis, begin by examining how people are spending their time and money. Challenge traditional ideas and use data to actively seek out anomalies and surprises. Next, adjust your business model to reflect behavioral changes, considering what the new trends might mean for how you create and deliver value, whom you need to partner with, and who your customers should be. Finally, put your money where your analysis takes you and be prepared to make more-aggressive, dynamic investments.

In many contexts, the firm is no longer an independent strategic actor. Its success depends on collaboration with other firms in a designed ecosystem spanning multiple sectors. In these cases, traditional strategy frameworks are of little help. Instead, the author says, companies should focus on five questions: (1) Can you help other firms create value? Success is as much about helping other firms innovate as it is about innovating yourself. (2) What role should you play? You don't necessarily need to be the chief architect of your ecosystem; sometimes you're better off sharing the role or being a complementor. (3) What should the terms be? There are two key governance choices: who can access the ecosystem, and how exclusively attached your partners must be. (4) Can your organization adapt? Customers' needs and complementors' desire and ability to collaborate can shift dramatically, requiring changes in your allocation of resources. (5) How many ecosystems should you manage? Some successful orchestrators head up multiple ecosystems--each covering a different part of the business, and each leading to a different path for expansion.

The story of the PC industry has been etched in the minds of strategists as a template for how industries evolve in the knowledge economy. In the natural order of things, so the story goes, industries disaggregate as interfaces between various stages of the value chain become open and standardized, allowing value to migrate up or down the value chain. But value migration away from established players doesn't have to be inevitable, argue authors Michael Jacobides and John Paul MacDuffie. Auto manufacturers, for example, have kept a fairly constant share of their industry's total market capitalization despite much recourse to outsourcing and intense competition in the sector. Carmakers and other industry leaders like Apple and Google gain and hold on to strategic control and value in their industries in four key ways: (1) Controlling the assets least likely to be commoditized (and blocking others' efforts to do the same); (2) Serving as "guarantor of quality" to the end customer (including assuming responsibility for the entire product, even components made by suppliers); (3) Staying in close touch with changing customer needs (changes in the end consumer are often accompanied by shifts in who captures the most value in an industry); (4) Balancing the imperatives of growth and strategic control of the value chain. Through the lens of the auto industry, the authors look at how established players can defend value in their industries and how emerging players can change the competitive landscape to drive value their way.

It's time to reinvent the way companies develop strategy. Traditional strategy frameworks operate under the assumption that industries have distinct boundaries and that companies know who their rivals, customers, and suppliers are. Moreover, those frameworks create categories and visual representations that are static, using, for instance, maps and comparative value curves. Today, as the competitive landscape is continually redrawn and most industries are in a constant state of flux, the existing strategy tools do not offer much help. Instead of using maps, graphs, and numbers, executives should use words to write a playscript: a narrative that sets out the cast of characters in a sector, the way in which they are connected, the rules they observe, the plots in which they play a part, and how they create and capture value as the sector changes. Playscripts force companies to focus on the causes of change, and they allow companies continually to assess the relevance of their strategies. They also acknowledge that strategy could involve changing a company's links to other players. Companies can follow a three-step process to reinvent their strategies using playscripts. Step 1: Write the current playscripts for your company and your sector. Step 2: Rewrite your company's playscript and perhaps the playscript for the entire sector, focusing on how you could change the way value is created and which elements of the plot you could influence. Step 3: Future-proof your playscript by considering how customers' needs are evolving and building relationships that can reinforce your position.