Amazon is not standing still

During the pandemic:Amazon announced (3/16/20) that it is seeking to hire 100,000 people in its warehousing and delivery sectors. By comparison, UPS has a total of about 444,000 employees and FedEx has about 425,000 employees. Amazon, which is the source of many of...

The Time for Change

When you relocate from one residence to another, you are far more likely to change the brand of toothpaste that you use than at other times. The same is true of your cable TV provider, your laundry detergent, and where you buy household supplies or furniture. I...

Reconsidering Best Practices

As Will Rogers said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us into trouble. It’s what we do know that just ain’t so.” This column discusses how “best practices” can get in the way of better practices. Read...

User Innovation

User innovation and innovation communities are both growing in importance for firms and coming to be better understood. This column introduces a special issue of RTM on user innovation, with an interview with the originator of the concept, Eric von Hippel. Read...

Safe Purging of Natural Gas Pipelines

T. K. Perkins and J. A. EuchnerWhen a newly constructed natural gas pipeline is put into service, it can be safely purged of air by injection of a slug of inert gas, such as N2. The method of sizing the required slug is based on a model of dispersion in turbulent flow...

Path to Advanced Services

Aston University has formed a consortium of manufacturing companies seeking to move toward advanced services (servitization). This presentation summarizes Goodyear’s path to advanced services. Read Article

Constraint Driven Innovation

Successful innovation requires the management of multiple contexts: those of the customer, the offering itself, the business model for the offering, and the strategic aims of the hosting corporation. An approach to managing these contexts and the constraints they...

Business Model Innovation in Practice

Business model innovation is often the key to capturing value from innovation. Developing and implementing new business models in practice, however, is difficult and fraught with risk. This paper discusses a systematic approach to developing new business models and...

Paul Polak on Innovation to Reduce Poverty

Paul Polak has dedicated himself to the proposition that corporations can help the 2.6 billion people in the world living on less than $2 a day—and make a profit doing so. His various ventures are all dedicated to finding practical solutions to attack poverty at its...

Clay Christensen discusses Managing Disruption

Clay Christensen defined the term disruptive innovation after studying why companies fail while listening to their best customers and making what seem like good business decisions. In this interview, he discusses how to identify, think about, and manage disruptive...

Youngjin Yoo on Design in the Generative Economy

Digital technology is clearly changing the products and services that we use every day, but Youngjin Yoo sees a much more fundamental change. He believes the rise of digital technology is changing the very essence of products, making them generative. Increasingly,...

Two Flavors of Open Innovation

This column discusses the distinction between what I call open boundary innovation, which operates within the current management paradigm, and open-source innovation, which redefines the boundaries of the corporation itself. Read Article

The Limits of Crowds

During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, many people proposed crowdsourcing the solution. In this column, I discuss the naive expectations of some crowdsourcing initiatives and the erosion of trust in experts. I identify five criteria that may be prerequisites for...

Digitizing and Informating

Digital technology is allowing us to do things we could never do be- fore (or do as easily), but we are spinning off information as a consequence, with profound implications for our experience of life. Read Article