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A few years back, a seminal report came out, warning that India and China were educating thousands more innovators per year than the Western world and urging the U.S. to focus more on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. While this movement has since gained in strength, the authors show that there is little evidence to support it. They argue that great innovators like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg embrace both the Sciences (how things work) and the Arts (how people work), and in addition, they learn to think in ways that enable them to build new models that connect the two spheres. Teaching the model-building skill of Integrative Thinking, they argue, entails going beyond both hysteria about STEM and nostalgia about the Liberal Arts. The central goal of modern education must be the building of an 'integrative capacity', and the country that builds it first and best will enjoy the prosperity benefits.

In this interview, the director of Lincoln Centre's educational initiatives argues that what we think is what we see: most of us interpret new information in ways that bend toward our preconceptions and confirm them, and this tendancy shapes how we move through the world as individuals. Unfortunately, this tendency is magnified exponentially when we join together in groups. He provides several tools for avoiding such 'path dependence'-- including thinking inside the box and 'making room for awe' -- and explains why imagination is our greatest renewable resource.

Businesses would look quite different if managers thought like designers, the authors argue. For one, they would always begin with empathy - a deep understanding of their customer. Secondly, they would view themselves as creators of new-to-the-world products and services. And third, they would be in the habit of iterating their way to a solution - 'learning as they go' and incorporating the new learning into the next iteration. While many managers appreciate the power of design, a formal process has been elusive; until now. The authors describe a four-step process for bringing design thinking to life that begins with asking, 'What if?' and ends with asking 'What Works?' - the launch and learn stage. In the end, they show that an unavoidable but healthy tension will always exist between creating the new and preserving the best of the present, and as a manager, your key challenge is to learn how to manage that tension.

The 2.6 billion global citizens living on less than $2 a day face considerable barriers to effective healthcare, including limited health insurance, low health literacy, and residence in slums or remote areas that are frequently underserved. The authors describe how some highly innovative private healthcare companies have considered these barriers in the design of their products or services. They show that organizations such as India's Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital achieve their innovations by addressing three functional areas concurrently: marketing, finance and operations. They describe the four shared characteristics of these business models and show how these 'innovative exemplars' can inspire innovation across industries.

The ancient Eastern concept of Zen represents an entirely different way of looking at the world. When most of us approach problems, we focus on what is there, and what to do, rather than on what isn't there, and what to stop doing. The author argues that by shifting to the Zen perspective, we realize that when it comes to a product, service, strategy or experience--what isn't there can often be as or more powerful than what is. He provides an introduction to the seven key Zen sensibilities and sketches their evolution from and incorporation into art, architecture and commercial and corporate design.

Few people will be surprised to hear that the number-one reason for customer complaints these days is poor service: long wait times, impersonal delivery, inconvenient hours and locations - the list goes on. Perhaps this is because everything from marketing slogans ("have it your way," "affordable luxury") to new technologies ("always-on," "on demand") has led us to believe that the customer is always right, no matter what. But the same trends that have led us to expect instant gratification are also enabling businesses to develop innovative models for accommodating customers' intensified demands. The authors introduce the concept of Collaborative Service and show how it provides an opportunity to discover what is truly meaningful to your customers and design category-changing service gestures that not only better serve people, but also make a strong statement about your brand.

Orthodoxies -- unstated assumptions that go unquestioned -- are present within every organization. They can range from seemingly-innocuous biases or conventions to, at their most extreme, something that approaches religious-like devotion to a specific set of ideals. In most cases, they are not explicitly recognized, instead lurking below the surface, invisible icebergs on which a seemingly flourishing company might founder. The end result: people fall into autopilot mode and fail to imagine better ways to tackle challenges and everyday activities. The authors present a five-step plan for 'flipping' orthodoxies in your organization that can enable people to imagine a different future that encompasses more than just business as usual.

Much has changed since advertising's 1950s heyday - the Mad Men era, when you could count the number of TV channels on one hand and advertising was all about informing and persuading consumers. Today, that model has been turned on its head: the most significant conversations happen not between advertisers and consumers, but between consumers and other consumers. However, the author - who has worked in advertising since 1974 -- argues that despite the rampant changes, many of the key lessons he learned early on continue to endure. He provides ten guidelines that would have worked in the 1950s and can still be used to create strong advertising in today's McLuhan-esque world. He describes these guidelines - which include 'cut through the clutter' and 'leave a lasting impression' -- in detail and shows how brands from Charles Schwab to Dove to Doritos have used them to successfully engage consumers.

In an excerpt from the 2011 Skoll World Forum, leaders from Danone, Cisco and Novartis describe how they are working to develop scalable solutions to some of the world's most pressing issues by engaging local communities in the solution. They describe their initiatives - which include tackling malnutrition in Bangladesh, health care treatment in rural India, and educating youth for the technologically-driven 21st century - in detail and discuss lessons learned to date, providing inspiration and proof that public companies can drive large-scale change in the world.

Business life has always featured the unpredictable, the surprising, and the unexpected. But in today's hyperconnected world, complexity is the norm. Systems that used to be separate are now intertwined and interdependent, and knowing the starting conditions is no guide to predicting outcomes; too many continuously changing interactive elements are in play. Managers looking to navigate these difficulties need to adopt new approaches. They should drop outmoded forecasting tools-for example, ones that rely on averages, which are often less important than outliers. Instead, they should use models that simulate the behavior of the system. They should also make sure that their data include a good amount of future-oriented information. Risk mitigation is crucial as well. Managers should minimize the need to rely on predictions-for instance, they can give users a say in product design. They can decouple elements in a system and build in redundancy to minimize the consequences of a partial system failure, and turn to outside partners to extend their own company's capabilities. They can complement hard analysis with "soft" methods such as storytelling to make potentially important future possibilities more real. And they can make trade-offs that keep early failures small and provide the diversity of thought needed in a nimble organization faced with complexity on virtually every front.

Having studied the relationship between how newly merged companies brand themselves and their subsequent stock performance, the authors find that a "fusion" branding strategy-one that combines elements of the two companies' names and logos-leads to superior financial returns three years out. The reason, they believe, is that this approach sends reassuring signals to employees, customers, and ultimately investors.

The case describes Information Technology at Cirque du Soleil in 2000, when a new Chief Information Officer was hired. The main challenge of the CIO was to find out how IT could best serve the Cirque. She was convinced that to meet this challenge, she had to develop an IT strategic vision that would be accepted by the top management of Cirque du Soleil, to deploy a highly professional IT group and increase the credibility of IT among the firm's leaders.

This short case describes a famous experiment conducted by Sir Ronald A. Fisher and colleagues to test Dr. B. Muriel Bristol's claim that she could tell-only by tasting-whether milk or tea was poured first into her cup. Using hypothesis testing, students must answer the question of how many correct picks the lady tasting tea (LTT) must make in order to "prove" her claim.

Nintendo faced huge difficulties in July 2011. Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox had caught up with the innovative motion-sensing controllers of the original Wii. And the new Nintendo 3DS handheld console had experienced a very disappointing start. Moreover, videogame consoles (particularly handheld ones) were facing increasing substitution from online and mobile games played on social networks and/or mobile phones (e.g. Zynga's Farmville). First, could Nintendo come up with a novel and innovative console once again (a Wii Encore) in order to escape head-to-head competition against its two larger rivals (Sony and Microsoft)? Second, how could Nintendo fend off the new substitutes, which were competing for a large portion of its customers?

In early May 2011, Daphne Zohar, founder and managing partner of PureTech Ventures, a life science venture creation company in Boston, MA, was reviewing a term sheet she had just received from a venture capital (VC) firm for one of PureTech's portfolio companies. The term sheet was due to expire in a week, but through negotiations of term sheet items, PureTech could probably leave the discussions with the venture firm open for another month. PureTech had a unique position in the life sciences ecosystem. It aimed to tackle important medical needs by translating scientific innovations into commercially viable technologies, and in order to do that optimally, was structured as an operating company that created start-ups rather than a typical venture fund that simply invested in them. The VC term sheet Zohar was considering outlined a Series A funding round for one of PureTech's newly created companies. Meanwhile, Zohar's team was also in discussions with several large pharmaceutical companies that were interested in partnering or even acquiring the company. These discussions were progressing nicely but would not lead to a transaction by the due date set by the VC term sheet (or an additional month from then). The current situation presented her with a unique challenge. Should PureTech accept the "bird in hand" VC term sheet or turn it down and wait for the negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to play out? The latter route offered the potential for a desirable, near-term partnership, but risked that the negotiations would fall through, in which case PureTech would end up losing both time and the opportunity for near-term external validation of its portfolio company.

This case invites students to grapple with the dilemmas faced by Laura Lopez, the new Executive Director of a Puerto Rican educational advocacy NGO called Sapientis. Six months ago, Sapientis gained national visibility when its national coalition for educational reform and excellence (CECE) achieved a breakthrough by gaining government support for major educational reform. But, in the ensuing months, a variety of events have raised questions about how serious that commitment will be in practice.

In 2011, Haier, China's leading appliance manufacturer, had over $20 billion in worldwide sales and had just been named the leading refrigerator manufacturer worldwide. This case describes Haier's rise over three decades, from a defunct refrigerator factory in China's Shandong province to an international player with $5.5 billion in overseas sales. Haier had followed a nontraditional expansion strategy of entering the developed markets of Europe and the United States as a niche player before venturing into Middle Eastern and neighboring Asian markets. Looking ahead to the next decade, Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin saw opportunities for Haier to grow through product diversification and additional market penetration in both developed and emerging markets. He and his colleagues would depend on their experience of acquiring numerous companies, entering and retaining new markets, restructuring the organization, and managing hundreds of subsidiaries around the world. They would need to determine which of the lessons learned from Haier's international operations should be implemented in China and which skills learned at home could best be applied abroad.

Suitable for MBA, EMBA, GEMBA, and executive education programs, this note sets the stage to unfold an analysis of popular notions about how the world works. On one hand, some believe that global competition has created a flattened world and that globalization has leveled the playing field. Yet a zest to view the world as flat, others have said, results in an underestimation of the differences between countries-standardization, exact replication, and scale expansion on a global basis could be problematic. In this note, we acknowledge that the flat world has some lumps, but regardless of whether the world is considered to be flat or round, there are certain implications on both sides that business leaders need to be aware of in order to create global efficiency. The note offers three practical examples that students can work through and apply their learning.

More than ever, commercializing new patent-based products requires drawing on multiple inventions typically spread among a variety of organizations. Success requires overcoming the organizational barriers and transaction costs involved with accessing intellectual property. Innovators must also evaluate how best to appropriate value from the unique combinations that they create. This article presents a framework that provides ways of approaching both these challenges. These include a set of guidelines to assist managers in choosing from among three types of commercialization arrangements: licensing, componentization, and integration. This article then explores three strategies for appropriating the value of the innovator's own patent(s): proprietary, defensive, and leveraging. The choice of a strategy determines the scope of the intellectual property portfolio that needs to be assembled to best capture value. Four case studies demonstrate the application of the key theoretical concepts in real-world situations.

In October 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law a requirement that certain private health insurance plans provide coverage for mental illness equal to coverage provided for medical-surgical illness as part of an economic stimulus package, capping more than a decade of advocacy in both houses of Congress by a bipartisan coalition of Congressmen and Senators for mental health parity. Through multiple changes in Congressional leadership, the coalition - including Senators Pete Domenici (R - N.M.), Paul Wellstone (D - MN), and Edward Kennedy (D - MA) and Representatives Patrick Kennedy (D - R.I.) and Jim Ramstad (R - MN) - remained consistent and employed multiple procedural, political, and negotiation strategies to increase the visibility of mental health parity and advance their cause through piecemeal efforts. The sixteen-year path of mental health parity from first introduction in Congress to eventual enactment is an example of the impact of personal commitment, personalities and personal relationships, and the importance of the committee structure, political party leadership, and windows of political opportunity.