個案總覽

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. According to the authors, there are few questions in business more powerful than "What problem are you trying to solve?" The authors argue that leaders who can formulate clear problem statements get more done with less effort and move more rapidly than their less-focused counterparts. Clear problem statements can unlock the energy and innovation that lies within those who do the core work of an organization, whether it be manufacturing, product development, or service. As valuable as good problem formulation can be, it is rarely practiced. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have suggested that the brain is prone to leaping straight from a situation to a solution without pausing to define the problem clearly. Such "jumping to conclusions"can be effective, particularly when done by experts facing extreme time pressure, like fighting a fire or performing emergency surgery. But, when making change in an organization, neglecting to formulate a clear problem statement often prevents innovation and leads to wasted time and money. A good problem statement has five basic elements: It references something the organization cares about and connects that element to a clear and specific goal; it contains a clear articulation of the gap between the current state and the goal; the key variables -the target, the current state, and the gap -are generally quantifiable, even if they cannot be measured objectively; it is as neutral as possible concerning possible diagnoses or solutions; and it is sufficiently small in scope that it can be tackled quickly. To tackle complex problems, executives need to complement good problem formulation with a structured approach to problem-solving. The authors recommend an approach using a modified version of the A3 form, which was originally developed by Toyota Motor Corp. to support knowledge sharing in its factories by summarizing a structured problem-solving effort in a single page.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. What is the value of data? Many businesses don't yet know the answer to that question. But going forward, companies will need to develop greater expertise at valuing their data assets.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The 2017 Data & Analytics Report by MIT Sloan Management Review finds that the percentage of companies deriving competitive advantage from analytics increased for the first time in four years. Incorporating survey results and interviews with practitioners and scholars, the report finds that companies'increasing ability to innovate with analytics is driving a resurgence of strategic benefits from analytics across industries. The report is based, in part, on MIT SMR's seventh annual data and analytics global survey, which includes responses from 2,602 business executives, managers, and analytics professionals from organizations located around the world.

From Canada to Australia, Denmark to Singapore, governments are embracing insights from Behavioural Economics to improve the lives of their citizens. The authors describe the basics of 'Choice Architecture' and show that testing different 'nudges' with users provides an outlet to review the status quo and improve interactions with the public.

Behavioral Economics pioneer Richard Thaler, the co-author of the best-seller Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, talks about the origins of the field, his key findings over a 40-year career and the importance of 'nudging for good.'

Every organization is in the same business: changing peoples' behavior. Do you want your customers to do something specific? Make it easy! The author, who heads up the UK's Behavioural Insights Unit-widely recognized as the world's most advanced practitioner in this arena-shows why governments are slowly embracing this proven principle; and other organizations should, too.

When looking to assess the impact of radical technological change, the key is to ask yourself, What is this reducing the cost of? Only then can you determine what might really change. The authors-key players in the University of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab-argue that in the case of Artificial Intelligence, the answer is prediction. They show how this is posing a slew of new challenges for managers and employees alike.

The standard economic view suggests that people will commit to an action if the expected benefits outweigh the costs. But the authors show that this model is incomplete in an important way: It overlooks how actions come to mind. Before you weigh the costs and benefits of an action, what cognitive processes lead you to think of it in the first place? They show that, if we can understand what leads people to consider a particular action, we can design interventions that lead them to think of different possibilities.

In our daily lives we frequently face a tension between what we want to do (i.e. what we desire) and what we believe we should do. The authors summarize the key findings on 'want/should conflict' and discuss a series of interventions that policymakers, organizations, and individuals can use to promote more future-oriented, should choices. In the end, they show that the better we understand want/should conflict, the more successful we will be at designing effective interventions that shift behaviors in societally-beneficial directions.

Eric Kirzner interviews two of North America's leading value investors-Charles Brandes and Kim Shannon-about the current value investing environment, market efficiency, and how some things-like human behavior-never change.

When we want to learn a new skill in life, we try out a new behaviour. Some behaviours fulfill their intended purpose; others do not. Feedback-signals from the environment that tell us whether or not the behaviour we produced had the intended effect-is essential to changing, adapting or modifying human behaviour. That's what learning is all about. Learning theorists and practitioners agree that feedback is a prime enabler of learning. Yet in higher education, it is spotty, ill-timed or utterly missing. The authors-who head up the Self-Development Lab at the University of Toronto-show what can be done about it.

By embracing a vigilant mindset as a 'default state' and employing four tools-including 'asking lots of questions' and 'attending to artful dodges'-managers in any industry can develop a keen ability to notice unethical behaviour. The authors show that this is a critical step towards reducing both 'bounded ethicality' and 'bounded awareness' in today's organizations.

Consumer-facing companies in developed economies have experienced little to no growth since the global recession of 2008. As a result, the smartest of the bunch are now increasingly looking outward, trying to spur growth by turning to new sources of customer insight-including 'implicit' data such as biometrics, 'structured' batches of Big Data such as online behaviour and 'unstructured' data such as social media and call centre conversations. They provide advice for re-wiring the customer insight function in an organization.

Companies developing complex products face a crucial dilemma: the benefits of research and development (R&D) outsourcing such as lower costs, access to specialist knowledge, or shorter development lead times often have negative consequences for competence development due to the loss of opportunities for learning by doing. Having experienced the problems of outsourcing R&D, Fiat developed a novel organizational solution that offers new insights as to how firms can organize R&D to protect against innovation competence loss in R&D outsourcing.

The future organizational landscape may change drastically by mid-century as a result of widespread implementation of 3D printing. This article argues that global will turn local; mega (factories, ships, malls) will become mini; long supply chains will shrink; many jobs will be broadened to combine design, consulting, sales, and production roles; and large organizations will make room for smaller ones. "A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything." [President Obama, State of the Union Address, 2013].

While Porter and Kramer's Creating Shared Value (CSV) works well as a management framework to address "win-win" business and society issues, it leaves managers ill-equipped to legitimately manage issues where they face the prospect of "win-lose" or "lose-win" social engagements. For legitimacy, managers need to bolster CSV with ethical frameworks-specifically, norm-taking and norm-making frameworks. Managers can be better positioned to create shared value through CSV+, a multipart framework built around CSV and augmented by ethical frameworks.

Customer experience is heralded as the competitive battleground; however, it is defined so broadly that companies often struggle to define, implement, and measure it. Based on the experiences of the Royal Bank of Scotland, this article develops an effective approach to scoping and managing customer experience, identifying typical pitfalls, and providing guidance to organizations trying to understand where to start.

This article traces the strategic initiatives that Walmart undertook over the last decade to implement its ambitious vision of selling more sustainable products. This effort has been characterized by a gradual shift away from customer-facing initiatives aimed at labeling sustainable products toward supplier-facing initiatives targeted at improving environmental or social performance without raising customer prices. It highlights the role of institutional intermediaries, transaction costs, and experiential learning in shaping firms' capabilities to translate ambitious sustainability goals into operable, mass-market initiatives.

In this article, we consider crowdsourcing from the consumer perspective. Specifically, we examine the identity value (i.e., sense of self) that consumers accrue by participating in creative crowds. How can managers structure crowdsourcing initiatives to maximize value for participants through identity creation and expression? We strive to answer this question first by examining the different types of crowdsourcing initiatives from a value co-creation perspective. Then, we evaluate how consumers construct identities through consumption and review the literature on identity theory. Finally, we link the identity type-personal, extended, or social-to the management of crowdsourcing ventures and offer suggestions for practitioners.

Civic challenges such as urban mobility and energy problems offer new corporate innovation opportunities. However, such challenges are wicked and difficult to tame. They require novel solutions that account for and integrate contradictory perspectives within the local innovation ecosystem of firms, governments, and citizens. This article presents a successful civic innovation crowdsourcing project case study, in which multinational firm Bombardier encouraged a global civic crowd to co-create visionary solutions to the challenge of future mobility in crowded cities around the world. Bombardier recruited a global crowd of 900 individuals and facilitated the citizen development of more than 215 solutions of unique firm value. We explore the process and outcome of this crowdsourcing project and derive actionable design principles for a three-phased civic innovation crowdsourcing process including: (1) crowd construction, (2) crowd knowledge acquisition, and (3) crowd knowledge assimilation. This process enables the crowd to integrate members' diverse and contradictory knowledge proactively at both the team and individual levels. Additionally, the crowd is able to balance extension of existing local solutions and exploration of path-breaking technologies and solution concepts.