個案總覽

This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, two key drivers of employee brand engagement are identified using the content analysis tool DICTION-namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2x2 matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stakeholders engage with brands.

While multiple studies have discussed the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in recruiting, two important but unaddressed questions constrain the understanding and practice of presenting firms' socially conscious efforts to their prospective employees. First, are companies engaged in CSR communicating their CSR practices effectively in online recruitment advertising? And second, what CSR information should companies include in online job advertisements to improve their employer attractiveness to prospective candidates? The findings of this study show that CSR communication in recruitment advertising is often limited, an ad-hoc practice, and mostly focused on company practices concerning employee participation and development. Even companies with a great CSR reputation take surprisingly little advantage of their CSR image when it comes to attracting job candidates. To improve employer attractiveness, we recommend that human resources managers consider (1) optimizing the structure of online job advertisements by including a company overview section in which CSR information can be presented easily, (2) expanding the scope of CSR dimensions in job advertisements to include environmental performance and community relations, (3) offering information about opportunities for employee engagement with CSR, and (4) adopting a strategic approach to the inclusion of CSR content in online job advertisements.

In recent years, many cities have experienced new forms of collaboration that have an impact on citizens and entrepreneurs. The integration of this field of study with civic crowdfunding can influence economic growth and community building, which may be beneficial for both policymakers and practitioners alike. Civic crowdfunding is a financial model through which citizens, in collaboration with government and local authorities, fund projects to provide a community service. The development of smart cities is related to civic engagement, empowerment, and participation intended to be part of crowdsourcing or entrepreneurial activities. In this sense, cities play a vital role as drivers of (open) innovation and entrepreneurship. Based on these considerations, this study proposes an explorative and qualitative approach to investigate the civic crowdfunding phenomenon and its ability to promote community development. Our exploratory analysis of six projects highlights the challenges and opportunities of civic crowdfunding for the creation, development, and improvement of more inclusive cities.

Lifecycle management of assets is essential for cost-effective maintenance and long-term economic viability. Properly maintained infrastructure provides significant economic advantages. Neglecting maintenance leads to lower productivity and imposes costs on users. Furthermore, delayed maintenance significantly increases total costs associated with repair or replacement. Lifecycle asset management should be used in the public sector to manage large-scale assets such as transportation infrastructure in a cost-effective manner. Yet, state governments have had little incentive to provide proactive maintenance. To address the infrastructure capital investment backlog, particularly acute in transportation, government priorities need to be coupled with long-term economic accountability. In addition, funding and financial reporting mechanisms should be created to ensure effective and efficient lifecycle asset management decisions. Public-private partnerships (PPP) also need to be fostered to help address regional deficiencies in infrastructure.

In today's connected economy, interorganizational relationships are increasingly important. Whether government-to-government, political party-to-political party, business-to-business, department-to-department, or some other interorganizational pairing, these relationships can provide organizations with signals used to identify and better respond to changes in their environment and in their interorganizational relationships. This enables astute organizations to not only understand how others will interpret the social signals they send, but also to shape those signals in ways that will improve their interorganizational relationships. We illustrate this herein, using the public and readily recognizable relationships involved with labor relations in the professional sports industry. We show how social signals can explain the way organizations change and adapt to their environments, and how these changes send messages to related organizations. Finally, we provide a set of recommended advice for managers based on this case analysis.

This article investigates responses of the international and domestic (South Korean) publics to one of the most hotly debated corporate scandals in recent years: Korean Air's so-called nut rage incident. By analyzing both international and domestic media coverage of the occurrence, we reveal contrasting interpretations between the two. Whereas the South Korean public tends to generate intense debates addressing a lack of ethics in Korean Air's public communication following the incident, international public criticism is dominated by questions regarding South Korea's chronic chaebol system and its negative image in relation to South Korea's unique institutional context. Korean Air's incongruent notice of the employee as a key stakeholder is also discussed in the international media. Our research findings indicate how, rather than focusing on legal responsibility, the normative attitude of businesses toward stakeholder pressures is crucial as a means of escaping legitimacy-threatening events. The results of this study demonstrate how public responses to a single incident are diverse in global society and offer new insights regarding the importance of ethics in management leadership and public communication after a crisis incident.

This work utilizes the theory of social power as a lens through which to analyze the power structure of firms and consumers involved in crowdsourcing and discusses the managerial implications of this power balance. The results of this analysis reveal how power is structured differently in each form of crowdsourcing, with consumer power being strongest in the case of idea crowdsourcing and weakest in the case of microtask crowdsourcing. These differences in power have implications for managers who initiate and maintain crowdsourcing endeavors. Understanding the structure of consumer power in different types of crowdsourcing allows firms to better prepare for the wide range of possible outcomes as consumers inevitably push their own agendas regardless of whether or not these agendas are aligned with those of the firm.

What strategic choices do business leaders make when implementing new business models? This study tries to answer this question by analyzing the development of several business model innovations that were new to the industry. We find that business model innovators face four strategic trade-offs and accompanying tensions during the implementation of their business model innovation process: (1) the level of independence granted to the developer (independence vs. dependence), (2) the degree to which the roadmap is planned in advance (discovery vs. planned execution), (3) the degree to which the value proposition challenges the status quo (challenging vs. maintaining status quo), and (4) the rigor to which business model innovators preserve the logic of the initial value proposition (solid vs. fluid logic). Our in-depth analysis reveals that business model innovators make pragmatic decisions that may deviate from the guidelines offered by existing literature, and we offer insights into the drivers behind these decisions.

Over the past few years, Bitcoin has emerged as the first decentralized, global currency. The rise of Bitcoin has brought attention not only to digital currencies but also to the underlying technology empowering digital currencies: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that records and secures transactions in a peer-to-peer network. Besides empowering digital currencies, blockchain technology has given innovators the capability of creating digital tokens to represent scarce assets, potentially reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurship and innovation. Blockchain tokens may democratize entrepreneurship by giving entrepreneurs a new way to raise funds and engage stakeholders. They may democratize innovation by giving innovators a new way to develop, deploy, and diffuse decentralized applications. Blockchain technology and tokens have sparked a new wave of innovation, which may start to revolutionize entrepreneurship and innovation.

What's the optimal number of new products to launch in a given time frame? Does it matter whether the launches are spread out or bunched together, and whether a new product is similar to the rest of a company's portfolio? To answer those questions, researchers studied 1,904 new drugs launched by U.S. pharmaceutical firms from 1991 to 2015. This article describes their findings, including the calculation that the average firm in the study could increase its market value by more than $700 million if it reduced the irregularity of its launches by 10%. Also included is a Q&A with Ellen Donahue-Dalton, executive vice president and chief marketing and customer experience officer at Medecision, about how that company has put the research findings into practice.

New research shows that the key to equality may be to focus on the similarities between men and women, not the differences.

When the author was tapped to join Levi Strauss, in 2011, the company's financial performance had been erratic for a decade. He went on a listening tour, conversing with each of the top 60 executives, asking them what three things absolutely must change and what three things must not. He wasn't surprised to discover that a clear strategy was lacking. But he also saw that a lack of urgency, of financial discipline, and of data discipline permeated the culture. After six months on the job, Bergh and his team rolled out a plan consisting of four key pieces: (1) Build our profitable core (80% of profits come from men's jeans and Dockers); (2) Expand for more (seize the opportunity in women's clothing); (3) Become a leading omnichannel retailer (grow sales in the company's own stores and online); (4) Achieve operational excellence (cut costs, drive cash flow, become more data driven and financially disciplined). The new strategy provided funds for investment in the company's Eureka Innovation Lab, which had been colocated with a factory in Turkey. In 2013 a new facility was opened four blocks from headquarters in San Francisco. Its biggest success has been a revamped women's denim line. A second big investment was the purchase of naming rights for the San Francisco 49ers' new stadium--a 20-year, $220 million deal. Bergh saw that as an opportunity to put the Levi's brand back at the center of the cultural conversation.

When you ask workers what matters to them, respect from superiors often tops the list. Yet employees report more disrespectful and uncivil behavior each year. This disconnect happens in large part because leaders have an incomplete understanding of what constitutes workplace respect--and so even well-meaning efforts to provide it often fall short. The author's research shows that employees value two distinct types of respect. "Owed respect" is accorded equally to all members of a work group or organization. It's signaled by civility and an atmosphere suggesting that every member is inherently valuable. "Earned respect" recognizes individual employees who display valued qualities or behaviors. To better understand the two types of respect, the author spent 15 months studying a unique work program for female prison inmates--a context that sharply highlights the differences between a respectful environment and a disrespectful one. At Televerde, a B2B marketing firm, regular displays of owed and earned respect have created an extraordinarily engaged workforce responsible for impressive profitability and growth, and recidivism among Televerde's inmate employees is 80% lower than the national average. Although Televerde operates in an unusual context, its employees' need for respect is universal. The author details seven ways in which leaders and managers can convey owed and earned respect and thus build a workplace that allows employees--and, as a result, their companies--to become the best possible versions of themselves.

Researchers have struggled to establish a causal relationship between diversity and financial performance--especially at large companies, where decision rights and incentives can be murky, and the effects of any given choice can be tough to pin down. So the authors chose a "lab rat" with fewer barriers to understanding: the venture capital industry. VC firms are fairly flat: Every investor is a decision maker, and choices have clear business consequences. Using publicly available information, researchers can see how similar or different decision makers are and compare decision quality on the basis of investments' performance. After examining tens of thousands of VC investments, Gompers has found that diversity significantly improves financial performance on measures such as profitable investments at the individual portfolio-company level and overall fund returns. And even though associating with similar people can have social benefits for people who do so, it can lead investors and firms to leave a lot of money on the table. In this article Gompers and Kovvali describe the research and provide recommendations for reaping the business benefits of diversity.

When employees are disengaged and underperforming, the reaction of many managers is to try new incentives and ratchet up oversight and control. Yet often nothing improves. Why? Because the assumption behind such conventional approaches is that work is fundamentally contractual and that employees are self-interested agents who will seek to minimize personal effort. And that assumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Employees do just what is needed to earn a reward or meet a standard, and nothing more. But there is another way: Rally the organization behind an authentic higher purpose--an aspirational mission that explains how employees are making a difference and gives them a sense of meaning. If you do that, they will try new things, move into deep learning, and make surprising contributions. The workforce will become energized and committed, and performance will climb. In this article, Quinn and Thakor describe how organizations like DTE Energy, KPMG, and Sandler O'Neill have dramatically increased employee engagement after discovering their higher purposes. The authors outline eight steps other companies can follow to break free of the conventional thinking about worker motivation, help a higher purpose permeate decisions throughout the company, and set off a positive chain of events.

New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don't yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and infrastructure is lacking. In this article, the author suggests that tech pioneers would do well to heed a lesson he's gleaned from his research in the developing world: For long-term success, companies must invest in the surrounding ecosystem. The author presents examples of entrepreneurs who have done just that in China, Bangladesh, Africa, and Chile, benefiting the public as well as their own enterprises. He then describes how an Indian health care organization is tackling institutional voids as it expands into medical tourism in the Cayman Islands. An in-depth look at the nascent drone industry follows, with profiles of companies that are helping create the conditions for the industry's growth by amassing knowledge about best practices, influencing the development of regulations, exploring new uses for drones, developing a professional workforce, and so forth. The argument is that when firms launching innovative products or services look beyond their self-interest and work to collectively build the institutional infrastructure, they--and society as a whole--are more likely to prosper.

The U.S. health care system needs reform, but too often experts focus on top-down solutions stemming from federal policy changes. Such efforts alone, however, cannot fix a wasteful and misdirected system. What's needed is innovation driven by doctors, nurses, administrators, entrepreneurs, and even patients who are devising new solutions to daily challenges. This article looks at two examples of bottom-up innovation, each involving a radical transformation of health care delivery. The University of Mississippi Medical Center created a homegrown telehealth network to increase patient access to care; Iora Health developed a new business model that doubled down on primary care to reap large savings in secondary and tertiary care. These successful initiatives--one from an incumbent health care provider and one from a business start-up--demonstrate the potential of creative leaders to reshape the U.S. health system.

We are entering a new era in additive manufacturing, or "3-D printing." It has major implications for the adoption of the technology and for the choices of business models available to companies that take the plunge, says the author. Advances in the technology's capabilities and expansion of the available materials and the supplier ecosystem have made it possible to produce a much broader range of affordable things--from the soles of running shoes to turbine blades--and, in many cases, in much higher volumes. As a result, 3-D printing is moving from a limited role (such as prototyping and making conventional machine tools) to a central place in manufacturing for a growing number of industries. Strategically, that means additive is becoming a full-fledged competitive weapon: It can be used to hold on to market leadership, to dethrone the dominant player, and to diversify by exploiting a printer's capability to make products for different industries. Consequently, leaders need to understand additive's capability and potential and the choices open to them in the near future. This article presents them with a playbook and explores six possible business models that have emerged.

Artificial intelligence is transforming all sectors of the economy, but there's no reason to fear that robots will replace all human employees. In fact, companies that automate their operations mainly to cut their workforces will see only short-term productivity gains, say the authors. Their research, involving 1,500 firms in a range of industries, shows that the biggest performance improvements come when humans and smart machines work together, enhancing each other's strengths. People need to train AI agents, explain their outputs, and make sure they are used responsibly. AI agents, in turn, can assist people with information gathering, data crunching, routine customer service, and physical labor, thereby freeing them for higher-level tasks that require leadership, creative thinking, judgment, and other human skills. To get the most out of AI, companies need to redesign their business processes. After deciding what needs improvement--their operational flexibility, speed, or scalability; their decision making; or their ability to personalize products and services--they can devise appropriate solutions. That will mean not only implementing AI technology but also developing employees who can work effectively at the human-machine interface. The authors describe how a number of firms are already taking these steps and optimizing collaborative intelligence. But many more should follow their example.

Dimon has been at the helm of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States, for more than 12 years. A straight-talking guy from Queens (albeit a billionaire with an MBA from Harvard Business School), he has led the bank on a steady path of growth, having weathered both the 2008 financial crisis and the "London Whale" trading scandal. Dimon calls that latter episode "the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of." In this edited conversation with HBR's editor in chief Adi Ignatius, Dimon talks about the public's view of Wall Street, post-recession regulations, the risk of cyberattacks, globalism, inequity, and the rebuilding of U.S. cities. JPMorgan has a plan to invest $150 million in Detroit by 2019 to help launch small businesses, retrain workers, and revive the property market. It has announced similar investments in underserved areas of Chicago ($40 million) and Washington, DC ($10 million). "It's good to help society," Dimon says. "Our customers love it; our employees love it."