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The Stratford Festival was already one of the world’s best-known and successful drama festivals — though probably one of the most homogenous with regard to its audiences and playbill. When in 2005 the executive and board needed an integrated plan for diversity and inclusion, they hired a consulting firm that utilized The Six Cylinders Model to attract families, people under 35, non-Caucasians, and immigrants. This article explains how the festival incorporated each of the cylinders: 1) leadership & governance, 2) products and services, 3) human capital, 4) work environment, 5) marketing, and 6) stakeholder connections.

Many marketing officers struggle to identify the return on investment of social media activities. This article calls for marketers to reassess how they view social media; this includes having specific metrics related to volume, customer attitudes, qualitative measures, and modeling. After examining marketing analytics’ historical focus on product sales rather than customers, the article details social analytical models for smart system planning, which could become a new way for companies to understand their ability to plan, forecast, and measure the effectiveness of their marketing investments.

The need to develop leadership succession plans is of key importance, yet most companies lack them. This article offers reasons for this failing, including CEOs’ resistance to facing their own mortality, and board members being too concerned about job security to broach the topic. It also examines company outsiders versus insiders in leadership succession and shares lessons from top-performing companies. Finally, it offers five key steps for firms to follow in avoiding a crisis in leadership succession, including giving prospective leaders the opportunity to meet with the board of directors, encouraging differences of opinion, and ensuring that the CEO recognizes the importance of leadership succession.

In a world of widely distributed knowledge, the emergence of Open Innovation means that firms cannot afford to rely only on their own research, but should buy or license processes from other firms. Further, they should allow unused internal inventions to be taken outside the company through licensing and spin-offs. This article, by the scholar who coined the term Open Innovation, chronicles the history of innovation from the 1960s to the new millennium, when Open Innovation arose. It offers predictions for the future of innovation, such as that innovation management will become more collaborative and that business model innovation will become as important as technological innovation.

Recent events such as the global financial crisis and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have undermined confidence in the ethics of business institutions. Instilling company values is more important than ever, yet a values-driven culture cannot be created with rules and mission statements alone. This article, in seeking an approach to ethics and compliance that engages both employees and leaders, proposes a five-step Giving Voice to Values (GVV) approach that includes reframing key questions in conflict situations, pre-scripting responses to value conflicts, and peer coaching.

Many managers believe that the acquisition and application of knowledge from external sources will have a clear impact on firm performance and innovation, yet little research exists that helps managers determine the impact of that knowledge. This article seeks to examine whether the use of external knowledge delivers the competitive advantage often claimed. It explains that the outcome of using external knowledge sources may not be positive, and is dependent on a firm’s strategies and capabilities. The authors use a study of the fifteen largest firms in the semiconductor industry to reinforce their arguments.

Embracing neuroleadership — the art of synchronizing the science of the brain with leadership behaviours — offers promise for a leader effecting real change within an organization. Neuroleadership helps in understanding the impact that emotions and behaviours have on our successes and failures. This article discusses the value of neuroleadership, the AGES-learning model (attention, generation, emotions, and spacing), and how to build neuroleadership into organizational learning and development.

Although innovation investments are the right strategy for the long term, it is rare that CEOs increase their innovation budget while the effects of a recession persist. This article suggests that the solution to this dilemma lies not in changing the level of innovation spending, but in rethinking the type of innovation investment made. Given their potential benefits in a recessionary environment, it is important to understand three non-mainstream approaches to innovation. Cost innovation involves creative ways of re-engineering products or processes to eliminate elements that do not add value (e.g. many Chinese firms). Application innovation means creating a new application for an existing product or technology (e.g. the sandwich). Business model innovation entails redesign of a business model to create more value for customers (e.g. low-cost airlines). The authors’ extensive research with Chinese companies has yielded four guidelines for pursuing a broad innovation agenda: start from the market; simplify, don’t complicate; play the beggar, not the duke; and go for immediate impact.

After decades as a CEO and years as the Dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business, business students and other aspiring leaders often ask me what inspired me to become a leader. Was there a moment in my career when I decided that I was going to become the CEO? Did I have a boss who encouraged me or a role model that I wanted to follow? Did I have a plan - a clear path forward early on my career?

Innovation is a While the introduction of an innovative product or service may be highly publicized or glamorous, the process of innovation is driven less by creative brainstorming or strategic planning than by carefully managed and highly sophisticated cross-disciplinary thinking and research. This article explains how to manage the “fuzzy front end” of innovation, which refers to the insight-driven, prototype-powered search for innovation in the 21st century. It details seven phases of this strategic innovation process, including collecting customer insights, sense making and opportunity mapping, rapid concept prototyping, and customer cocreation.

This article suggests that the time is approaching when organizations will need chief creative officers instead of chief executive officers, and chief collaboration officers instead of chief operating officers. Managers are given practical steps on how to become a chief creative officer, and how to transform an organization into one capable of unleashing the power of self-organizing swarms. It also outlines the four types of knowledge workers — artists, scientists, teachers, and managers — and discusses the Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) seminar.

Due to their conservative nature, excessive aversion to risk, and strong reluctance to venture outside their comfort zone, Canadian businesses are being held back from seizing enormous opportunities in Asia. The article questions whether Canadians care about this failing and argues that Canadian business leaders must set their sights higher. It also offers steps on how to close the knowledge gaps that stop Canadian businesses from succeeding in Asia, including diversification of boards and corporate management teams, and awareness of expatriate management problems.

Imitators are often so successful that they push innovators out of business. Innovation has a well-established argument based on higher sales and growth, lower costs, and the transformation of a firm’s capabilities, yet imitators enjoy many of the same benefits. In fact, an imitator’s overall costs are estimated at 60 to 75 per cent lower. Generic drug makers, for example, not only leverage the investments of original developers but also save billions of dollars and decades of effort. With the benefit of hindsight, imitators capitalize on the shortcomings of early offerings. They choose what to adopt, singling out profitable opportunities, and are less likely to be complacent than innovators. However, even in an age of imitation ushered in by factors like globalization and outsourcing, business scholars have failed to recognize imitation as a complex endeavour that requires rare and valuable capabilities. <br><br>Crucially, imitation and innovation are not opposites. Though the capabilities to imitate share much with the capacity to innovate, innovators do not adopt them because of the stigma of imitation. This has prevented many firms from becoming “imovators,” able to fuse innovation and imitation. Good innovators and imitators both adapt imported elements or systems, combine different knowledge bases, and identify and leverage “spillovers.” Innovators are better at producing effective barriers to imitation, as much as imitators are experts at finding ways to overcome those barriers. In combining these two skill sets, firms can reap the benefits of innovation.

This article presents the Dynamic Capabilities Framework, which gives a prominent intellectual infrastructure for both theoretical and applied analyses of strategic management and other issues facing business makers. The popular management theory outlined here discusses the growing importance of intangible assets, the differences between intangible and physical assets, and the three clusters of activities and adjustments that define dynamic capabilities — sensing, seizing, and transforming — as illustrated with the example of various Apple products.

Bring up the topic of innovation and often the conversation will soon revolve around a cool, new gadget or an exciting start-up company with a revolutionary idea.-- If the talk is about the challenge of innovation, it usually focuses on developing something new, original and radically different. -- As the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity points out in its recent report, innovation has now become synonymous with invention, when invention is just part of the process of innovation.

A business leader cannot create a values-driven culture with rules and mission statements alone. Using techniques such as pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, leaders can learn to listen and employees can learn to speak, thus creating a circle of practice that removes values from the realm of aspiration and positions them squarely within the realm of everyday business practice. Readers will learn how to accomplish this important goal in this article.

For the companies that accept how time operates on their target markets and customers, time scarcity and attention scarcity will provide one of the best paths for innovation in the future. This article, by a former HP executive, examines how time spent shopping has remained constant over the past decades, even while the number of products has increased. It also discusses the Time-Value Framework and five modes of Time-Value Innovation, including Time Magnets and Time Slicing.

Many companies have embraced open innovation and not met success. But some of these companies are unfit for open innovation because they lack the capabilities needed to promote and leverage internal and external collaboration. These authors describe three innovation strategies — need seeker, technology driver, and market reader — and four steps for establishing open innovation. The article concludes with an interview with the chief technology officer of 3M, one of the world’s most innovative companies.

Emerging findings in neuroscience research suggest why inspiring and supportive relationships are important — they help activate openness to new ideas and a more social orientation to others. Insights such as these may move a leader’s actions away from a results orientation and toward a relationship orientation. This article considers sophisticated research such as a study with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in order to explore building relationships, emotional contagion and empathy, and helping and inspiring others.

Millions of vehicles recalled due to quality problems, multiple lawsuits, government investigations, and a very public apology from the company’s president have seriously damaged Toyota’s once-unassailable reputation. What do these problems say about the famed Toyota Production System? What will these problems and the wider economic crisis bring for the country’s automotive industry more generally? These authors recently visited Toyota and a number of automotive systems suppliers in Japan. Their observations and assessments of how the industry will fare in the years ahead are the basis for this article, which details the internationalization of the Japanese motor industry, the increasing use of temporary workers at motor plants, compensation systems, and lifetime employment.