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Today's startups are a major source of innovation, as they employ emerging technologies to invent products and reinvent business models. Corporations that embrace an open innovation strategy increasingly look to startups as a source of external innovation. Corporate accelerators offer a potent approach to nurturing innovations from entrepreneurial ventures. However, the vast differences between corporations and startups make collaboration a challenge. Corporate accelerators need to be designed effectively to add value for startups and create innovation benefits for the company. Based on information obtained during interviews with managers and participants of corporate accelerators (n=40), managers receive a framework and strategies for designing corporate accelerators. To leverage startups' innovation and to make corporate accelerators an effective part of a firm's overall innovation strategy, managers need to systematically and thoughtfully consider the design dimensions of proposition, process, people, and place.

There is no escaping the Big Data hype. Vendors are peddling Big Data solutions; consulting firms employ Big Data specialists; Big Data conferences are aplenty. There is a rush to extract golden nuggets (of insight) from mountains (of data). By focusing merely on the mountain (of Big Data), these adventurers are overlooking the source of the revolution-namely, the many digital data streams (DDSs) that create Big Data-and the opportunity to improve real-time decision making. This article discusses the characteristics of DDSs, describes their common structure, and offers guidelines to enable firms to profit from their untapped potential.

Big data analytics has become an imperative for business leaders across every industry sector. Analytics applications that can deliver a competitive advantage appear all along the supply chain decision spectrum-from targeted location-based marketing to optimizing supply chain inventories to enabling supplier risk assessment. While many companies have used it to extract new insights and create new forms of value, other companies have yet to leverage big data to transform their supply chain operations. This article examines how leading companies use big data analytics to drive their supply chains and offers a framework for implementation based on lessons learned.

A signature story is an intriguing, authentic, involving narrative with a strategic message that enables a firm to grow by clarifying or enhancing its brand, customer relationships, organization, and/or the business strategy. Signature stories represent a critical asset that can be leveraged over time and which can provide inspiration and direction both inside and outside the firm. The challenges are to find, evaluate, gain exposure for, and give legs to signature stories.

How a social or political issue is framed shapes the "nonmarket" context that surrounds it. Issue frames are not random; rather they are the product of strategic behavior by firms, government agencies, NGOs, and similar actors. Frames are not fixed and issues can be reframed over time. Framing is a powerful strategic tool that enables firms to shape the structure of the nonmarket environment to their advantage. This article identifies and illustrates five distinct pathways through which firms can shape different dimensions of the nonmarket environment.

Driven by recent socio-economic developments, manufacturing firms increasingly adapt their business models along two dimensions. Apart from vertically integrating the entire product life cycle, traditionally separated tasks are re-allocated into new forms of horizontal stakeholder collaborations. Incorporating these two dimensions, this article develops a framework of nine business model archetypes that holistically capture the increasing openness of business models towards consumers in the emerging closed-loop value chain. Using illustrative examples, it demonstrates their broad applicability in different industries and derives important managerial implications for firm-consumer relationships, the relevance of consumer communities, new product development activities, and the sustainability of business models.

Competitive retaliation is a significant constraint to merger and acquisition performance that has largely been overlooked by management research. This article employs competitive dynamics theory to explore how acquisition characteristics impact the risk of competitor retaliation. It then outlines different tactics that acquiring firms can use to reduce competitor awareness, motivation, and capability associated with retaliation. It provides managers with a path to improving acquisition performance and also opens new avenues for research.

Following the surprise Brexit vote, business leaders need to stop worrying about the occasional Black Swan and understand that dealing with unexpected world-changing events is the new normal. Despite some opinions that Britain’s exit from the European Union could be good for Canadian business, nobody knows yet whether the Brexit vote will be good over the long term for Canadian exports, not to mention the loonie. Heightened uncertainty is where the lessons from the Brexit vote can be found for both the public and private sectors. For corporate leaders, the lessons of Brexit are about planning for unexpected events—a prevailing characteristic of the “new normal” caused by more robust mega-trends created by social, economic and political forces. Brexit should drive business leaders to review existing strategy in this much larger context. Winning firms will pay extra attention to agility when planning overall business models, including a portfolio approach to asset configurations and the particular locations of value creation and value extraction. The rise of socio-economic and political mega-trends will trigger the growth of “no-equity” corporations—businesses that are extremely agile and capable in managing across existing and emerging networks and boundaries, thanks to reduced reliance on equity-based business models. Instead of developing contingencies, leading firms will disrupt themselves to come up with new business models that allow them to stay ahead of the competition.

There is no question that coaching has accelerated leadership development at companies big and small, including some of the most successful members of the Fortune 500 club. But what exactly is coaching, and why is its importance growing significantly in the corporate world? Despite all the ambiguity that surrounds coaching, there are three fundamental principles associated with the process of helping people identify the blind spots that derail them from progress and effectiveness as well as the sweet spots that accelerate their journey through the realization of potential. These are: 1. Coaching leads the coachee to revisit his/her assumptions — the core engine of belief systems. 2. Coaching triggers the coachee to review his/her image in the light of feedback from his/her surroundings. 3. Coaching enables the coachee to update his/her portrait. Executive coaches help coachees stress-test ideas, viewpoints, and perspectives before they are vocalized. They do so by addressing executive isolation, providing strategic sound-boarding, and creating a safe and motivating feedback loop for change. Accomplished coaches systematically lead their coachees to see their resistance to change, examine the root causes of this resistance, and understand how resistance limits personal growth and transformation.

Rewarding top advertising talent with a supervisory position can seriously backfire, especially in today’s market. It’s understandable to want to reward exceptional workers, but managers often believe that the only way they can do so is by promoting them to supervisory roles. This thinking is not only untrue, it is dangerous. Leadership requires a completely different skill set than most people use in performance positions. Employees who perform exceptionally aren’t necessarily good at training or supervising others. <br><br> Today’s marketing environment makes it treacherous to move ad agency employees around without planning. The rise of tech- and data-driven strategies only adds new levels of complexity and heightens expectations from clients, who want seasoned professionals with a deep understanding of their industry. So when you finally have an employee firing on all cylinders for your agency, it can be a big mistake putting them in new roles. Before you promote top performers, have a candid conversation with them. But first determine possible options for moving forward. Besides a promotion to a supervisory role, reward options could include an arrangement to split time between the employee’s current role and training others, or an agreement to develop new skills for a higher pay cheque. You can also consider options like more vacation time or a seat at the leadership table. Sometimes the best reward for hard work is helping people prosper — right where they are.

Employers are using pre-employment personality tests with increased frequency to identify the candidates best equipped to perform certain jobs and to eliminate the candidates least likely to succeed. While these tests promise higher retention rates and increased objectivity in hiring, they can also expose employers to litigation for violation of federal anti-discrimination statutes. This installment of Accounting Matters explores several recent lawsuits and the laws governing the discrimination claims, and concludes by offering several best practices for reducing the risk of litigation when using pre-employment personality tests.

Over the last decade, explicit emphasis on the creation of social value has grown in profit-seeking firms as well as non-profits and has even led to the emergence of a new legal organizational classification known as for-benefit corporations. Like financial value, social value is dynamic and therefore subject to perpetual changes in the firm's external environment, changes that yield opportunities and threats for the firm. Although social entrepreneurship researchers have begun to study the identification and exploitation of opportunities to create social value, this research has taken place primarily within the context of start-up organizations. In contrast, corporate entrepreneurship research has emphasized value creation within existing firms, but focused primarily on the identification and exploitation of opportunities to create financial value. Combining the two, we examine the creation of social value within the firm by proposing the social corporate entrepreneurship scale (SCES), a new instrument that measures organizational antecedents for social corporate entrepreneurship and that offers managers an opportunity to analyze whether the perceived environment is supportive of corporate entrepreneurial behaviors intended to create social as well as financial value. The article concludes with a discussion of the instrument's potential contribution to managerial practice.

Kasriel grew up around computers and started writing programs when he was 12. In a way, he says, he was like one of today's typical Silicon Valley kids, but for him it was Paris in the 1980s. He recognized in high school that he prefers to be with small numbers of people or to be alone. Getting by in a crowd doesn't come naturally--but as a CEO he now has to mingle at huge networking events or conferences. To manage that, he sets goals: Talk to at least 30 people, get 10 business cards, arrange five follow-up meetings. For 10 years Kasriel has worked to overcome the perception that engineers don't make great leaders. He sought projects and talked his way into jobs that were outside his comfort zone. He read widely to burnish his skills in strategy, leadership, and managing people. (The article includes a list of titles the author deems most influential.) He spent hundreds of hours taking online courses. He got an MBA at INSEAD not because he wanted to make a career change or expand his network but so that he could avoid the mistakes he'd seen other entrepreneurs make. Since assuming his role, in April 2015, he's learned that a lot of the job comes down to helping employees feel excited about their work, empowering them, and giving them the resources they require. When people come to him with difficulties, he must listen first and not see every situation the way an engineer would: as a problem that needs a solution.

Over the past 25 to 30 years, agile innovation methods have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams. Now those methods are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even reaching into the C-suite. But many executives don't understand how to promote and benefit from agile; often they manage in ways that run counter to its principles and practices, undermining the effectiveness of agile teams in their organizations. From their work studying and advising companies that have successfully employed agile methods, the authors have discerned six crucial practices for capitalizing on agile's potential: (1) Learn how agile really works; (2) understand when it is appropriate; (3) start small and let passionate evangelists spread the word; (4) allow teams that have mastered the process to customize their practices; (5) practice agile at the top; and (6) destroy corporate barriers to agile behaviors. They expand on each, providing executives with a practical guide for accelerating innovation and profitable growth.

"Planned opportunism" is the author's term for responding to an unpredictable future by paying attention to weak signals--early evidence of emerging trends from which it is possible to deduce important changes in demography, technology, customer tastes and needs, and economic, environmental, regulatory, and political forces. That attention gives rise to fresh perspectives and nonlinear thinking, which help an organization imagine and plan for various plausible futures. Planned opportunism is a discipline that creates a "circulatory system" for new ideas; develops the capacity to prioritize, investigate, and act on those ideas; and builds an adaptive culture that embraces continual change. Govindarajan illustrates his thesis with several compelling company stories. For example, Tata Consultancy Services decided to divest its fast-growing call-center operations at the height of the boom in that business, because its leaders could see that technologies were moving to the cloud and that global enterprises would eventually demand higher-level, more strategic outsourced services. Call centers would just get in the way of that future. And Hasbro, the toy and game maker, acted on numerous technological and demographic shifts in the 1990s to significantly outpace its leading competitor, Mattel.

Leaders face a multitude of strategic paradoxes--contradictory pressures that are too often viewed as "either/or" choices. There are "innovation paradoxes," in which the pursuit of new offerings and processes conflicts with the mandate to sustain the tried and true. There are "globalization paradoxes," which involve tensions between local imperatives and boundary-crossing integration. And there are "obligation paradoxes," when the goal of maximizing profits for shareholders clashes with the desire to generate benefits for a broader group of stakeholders. The authors argue that organizational success depends on simultaneously addressing such conflicting demands, not choosing between them. Leaders need to become comfortable with multiple truths and inconsistency. They need to assume that resources are ample rather than scarce. And they need to embrace change instead of seeking stability. All of this will help organizations reach a state of dynamic equilibrium, wherein paradoxes don't impede progress--they spur it. And the way to tap the potential of paradox is to both separate and connect opposing forces: Managers must pull apart the organization's goals and value each of them individually, while also finding linkages and synergies across goals.

Organizations and individuals are notoriously poor at judging the likelihood of uncertain events. Predictions are often colored by the forecaster's understanding of basic statistical arguments, susceptibility to cognitive biases, desire to influence others' thinking, and concerns about reputation. Indeed, predictions are often intentionally vague to maximize wiggle room should they prove flawed. But getting judgments wrong can of course have serious consequences. On the basis of research involving 25,000 forecasters and a million predictions, the authors identified a set of practices that can improve companies' prediction capability: providing training in the basics of statistics and biases; assembling teams of forecasters to debate and refine predictions; and tracking performance and giving rapid feedback. To improve prediction capability, companies should keep real-time accounts of how their top teams make judgments, including underlying assumptions, data sources, external events, and so on. Keys to success include requiring frequent, precise predictions and measuring prediction accuracy for comparison.

Today companies grapple constantly with the unexpected: disruptive advances in technology, the rise of new markets, sudden swings in demand, surprise moves by competitors. To cope, firms try to improve their forecasting and their agility, but those efforts take them only so far. A complementary--and perhaps more effective--approach is to use "strategic options." These are small bets that allow businesses to test the waters and build their experience. If they fail, they're easy to unwind, but if they succeed, they position organizations to capitalize on valuable opportunities. In this article, two BCG consultants detail three kinds of strategic options: "Temporary organizations," which are staffed by consultants and contractors, help firms ramp up operations quickly and yet avoid massive layoffs if an initiative fails. Small "exploratory acquisitions" allow firms to get a foothold in a new business--without the costs and headaches of large-scale deals. "Disposable factories" are a good solution to uncertain demand; they can be set up (and taken down) quickly, be sited closer to demand, and provide early data on costs and capacity that informs the construction of permanent facilities. Executives often resist strategic options because they seem expensive in the near term. But when a payoff is far in the future and risk is high, they may be the best way to go.

Although many companies claim to embrace failure as an integral part of the innovation process, near-zero tolerance for it blocks them from pursuing new ideas. Corporate budgeting, resource allocation, and risk control are all designed to promote predictability and efficiency, and even when people understand that they can and should fail, they do everything possible to avoid missteps. There's a way to resolve this conundrum, however: Increase your return on unsuccessful projects by rigorously extracting value from them, boosting their benefits while minimizing their downsides. In this article, two business school professors outline three steps you can take to improve your firm's return on failure. First, study projects that didn't pan out and document all the insights they offer about customers, markets, future trends, your organization, your operations, your team, and yourself. Second, magnify the impact of those lessons by spreading them across your company. Senior leaders should gather frequently to discuss their failures, and efforts to share lessons with all employees will build trust and goodwill and encourage future initiatives. Third, step back and do a corporatewide review of your pattern of failure, to ensure your overall approach is yielding all the benefits it should. If failure rates are too high, you may need to tighten up your systems, but low rates may signal a need to encourage more openness to risks. Mistakes are the inevitable consequence of trying something new. But they can also be a source of tremendous value in the form of learning if your firm has the right mindset.

In September 2011 Hewlett-Packard had just dismissed two CEOs in quick succession before inviting Meg Whitman to step into the role. She was taking the reins of a badly damaged company, and although she has presided over more than 80,000 layoffs, she has restored stability in her four and a half years on the job. In November 2015 HP became two new $50-billion-plus companies, with Whitman the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the chairman of HP Inc. In this edited interview she talks about why she agreed to take the job ("I thought that HP was a global icon and that nothing was fundamentally wrong with the bones of the company"), how the disastrous Autonomy acquisition happened ("It was financial misrepresentation"), the company's core values ("the ability to do incredible innovation; a passion for customer support and service; giving back to the community"), the role of a leader ("You have to communicate that you believe your goal can be achieved. You have to exude confidence. You have to celebrate the victories along the way"), and much more. Whitman says she is the product of her experiences in a variety of companies--Procter & Gamble, Bain, Disney, Hasbro, FTD, Stride Rite, eBay--and of her unsuccessful campaign for the governorship of California, during which she significantly developed her communication skills. She also played a lot of sports as a girl, "so I knew how to be part of a team."