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In today's environment, examples of work that is both complex and risky abound: delivering a large engineering and construction project; managing the response to a high-impact disaster; and providing medical care in the battlefield are but a few examples. This type of work requires multiple areas of expertise and often involves multiple organizations. The various teams that engage in risky work face high stakes -in financial, legal and reputational terms - and as a result, the role of trust in such contexts is critical. The authors define 'risky trust' and the particular challenges it poses. They then describe their research and the three elements of risky trust they identified, as well as four factors that leaders can embrace to facilitate trust in a risky context.

In an interview, one of the epidemiologists who helped eradicate smallpox talks about taking on five current global threats on behalf of the Skoll Global Threats Fund: climate change, pandemics, water scarcity, nuclear proliferation and Middle East conflict. He describes his early career and what it taught him about hope and collaboration. While he argues that our system is inarguably "breaking at the seams," the good news is, he remains optimistic about finding solutions.

Companies are starting to recognize that even as they spend millions to acquire and analyze customer data, many of their employees lack the skills necessary to effectively use that data in making decisions.

When you work for an organization that proudly touts its pay-for-performance ethos, you can be sure you'll get a fair shake, right? Not necessarily. In explicit meritocracies, managers feel more at liberty to act on their politically incorrect biases, with the result that they shortchange women when handing out raises and bonuses.

Even as companies increasingly embrace corporate social responsibility, it remains controversial in terms of the bottom line. New research reveals an unexplored benefit: CSR activities can make a company more innovative and lead them to launch more new products.

When people imagine practicing a skill or sport during "lucid dreaming," the state in which a sleeping person recognizes he's in a dream and takes control of it, their performance in that activity improves in real life.

Innovation capabilities have long been central to U.S. competitive advantage, but the rate of innovative activity is increasing sharply in other countries. Some people see this as the greatest threat to America's economic leadership. The author is unconvinced.

Unemployment rates remain high in this sluggish recovery period, but many places in the United States require more and more workers to be licensed in order to offer their services or open a business. Two of the worst areas are health care and law.

The World Economic Forum surveys experts and industry leaders every year to see what risks concern them most. This year's results, compiled from the responses of 469 leaders, put chronic fiscal imbalances at the top of the list. Other leading worries are rising greenhouse gas emissions; terrorism; water-supply crises; and cyber attacks.

Social media applications-including collaborative projects, micro-blogs/blogs, content communities, social networking sites, and virtual worlds-have become part of the standard communication repertoire for many companies. Today, with the creation of increasingly powerful mobile devices, numerous social media applications have gone mobile and new entrants are constantly appearing. The purpose of this article is to take account of this evolution, and provide an introduction to the general topic of mobile marketing and mobile social media. Herein, we define what mobile social media is, what it is not, and how it differs from other types of mobile marketing applications. Further, we discuss how firms can make use of mobile social media for marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, and relationship development/loyalty programs. We present four pieces of advice for mobile social media usage, which we refer to as the 'Four I's' of mobile social media. Finally, we conclude by providing some thoughts on the future evolution of this new and exciting type of application.

Millennials have heavily influenced social media's evolution into an important source of product information. They are increasingly basing their product evaluations on information gathered from online reviews. Thus, companies targeting Millennials may wish to pay heed to online reviews. Which products are affected by Millennials' online reviews? Do the reviews tend to be positive or negative? Where do Millennial customers look for information amongst the plethora of online venues? As presented herein, a survey of 227 Millennials reveals that this generation is undeniably posting reviews online and being influenced by these reviews. Respondents show a definite preference for two online venues, Facebook and company websites, when voicing their opinions. Reviews are broken down by positive and negative comments, and how product categories fare for each type. Contrary to popular thinking, the respondents were more prone to post positive reviews than negative reviews. Males voice their opinions online significantly more often than females, and specific gender differences are observed by product category. Recommendations are provided for selling to Millennials by leveraging online reviews.

This article examines the characteristics and applications of 3-D printing and compares it with mass customization and other manufacturing processes. 3-D printing enables small quantities of customized goods to be produced at relatively low costs. While currently used primarily to manufacture prototypes and mockups, a number of promising applications exist in the production of replacement parts, dental crowns, and artificial limbs, as well as in bridge manufacturing. 3-D printing has been compared to such disruptive technologies as digital books and music downloads that enable consumers to order their selections online, allow firms to profitably serve small market segments, and enable companies to operate with little or no unsold finished goods inventory. Some experts have also argued that 3-D printing will significantly reduce the advantages of producing small lot sizes in low-wage countries via reduced need for factory workers.

Trust is at the heart of a collaborative innovation capability. Without a foundation of trust, collaborative alliances can neither be built nor sustained. Using a two-stage qualitative research method, we discovered that managers understand neither the nature of trust nor the dynamics of trust building. To help alleviate these knowledge gaps, we herein develop a definition of collaborative trust, describe a trust maturity framework, and discuss the competitive power of trust. We conclude by presenting a dynamic systems model that elaborates on the process of building trust to improve collaboration, innovation, and competitive performance.

The service sector is dependent upon customers' willingness to contribute their knowledge, skills, and abilities to co-produce the service experiences they want and expect. Service organizations therefore seek to employ strategies that will enhance their customers' ability to do whatever they must to be successful in co-producing those experiences. Applying the concept of self-efficacy, we offer a theory-based approach to developing these strategies that firms may utilize. These strategies involve focusing both employee training and environmental cues on how to enhance the self-efficacy of the customer in performing whatever tasks are necessary toward a successful service experience.

While the impacts of culture on international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been much discussed, the influence of languages has been underappreciated in international business. We address this paucity by integrating literature from international economics, international business, Chinese business history, and linguistics to examine the transaction costs of languages. While we recognize that languages represent both a tool in international economic transactions and a vehicle to transmit cultural values, our results point out that this tool is employed differently in international trade and in FDI. Communication costs for both FDI and international trade show a hierarchy, with English the most inexpensive among major trade languages; however, we find that communication costs are much more important in FDI than in international trade. Herein, we offer practical suggestions corporations may implement regarding the matter.

A strategy called software product line engineering, or SPLE, is taking hold in industries in which software is an integral part of product offerings. Where it has found a foothold, SPLE has brought about remarkable results such as unprecedented product variation, substantial production cost savings, slashing of time to market, and massive productivity gains. SPLE is the software version of an old manufacturing concept: building a suite of products from common parts assembled under a common design in a common production facility. The special properties of software make SPLE a particularly high-payoff proposition. SPLE exploits the commonalities among products to achieve economies of scale, by creating core assets-assets that will be applied to multiple products in the product line. SPLE accommodates the differences among products by explicitly identifying and planning for those variations in product behavior and qualities. This management of variation allows the organization to achieve economies of scope and provides the capability of mass customization where every market is treated as a niche. Management ensures that core asset developers create effective core assets and product builders efficiently build products by using them. This requires oversight, coordination, and melding of purpose of groups that have slightly different inherent goals.

As commercials migrate from television to the Internet, marketers need to use different techniques to keep viewers watching--and to encourage them to send the ad to others. Harvard Business School's Thales Teixeira utilizes infrared eye tracking and facial-emotion-detection software to understand how people respond to online ads, and he offers five techniques to increase the odds an online ad will go viral.

Studies have always shown that the adage "There's no such thing as bad publicity" is wrong. It turns out, though, that sometimes the saying has merit. By studying sales of books reviewed in the New York Times, Jonah Berger of the Wharton School demonstrates that if a product is relatively unknown, even the most scathing publicity can help the bottom line by making people aware of the product's existence. This is good news for smaller and unknown producers, who might want to allow some bad press or to make controversial moves that risk incurring it.

When you're building a team to generate radical innovation, make sure you include a few conformists among the radical thinkers and rule-breakers. Conformists are crucial because they support the creatives and strengthen group cohesion, according to research on a high-tech company by Ella Miron-Spektor, Miriam Erez, and Eitan Naveh of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

A new study, which looks at the impact that typefaces have on learning, reveals that readers actually remember material better when it is presented in smaller, less-legible fonts. Teachers, marketers, and publishers, take note.