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There is little about creativity that seems logical. And yet, we continue to chase a reproducible path to creative insight. It is that insight, after all, that is the source [...]

General Electric Co. has adopted reverse innovation, or manufacturing products in developing countries and then marketing them globally. This enables it to compete with emerging giants.

Tips for generating and implementing breakthrough growth ideas include forgetting, or transcending established corporate culture; borrowing, or leveraging existing assets; and learning, or allowing for mistakes that yield valuable experience.

Entrepreneurship is a competence in only the rarest corporation. Pity, as its absence has led to the death of many revered companies. In an economic environment characterized by dramatic change, [...]

Issues discussed concern organizational learning and strategic management, focusing on the flow of business knowledge throughout a multinational corporation. Topics addressed include the valuation of intangible knowledge assets, knowledge-sharing between subsidiary and parent, and the effectiveness of knowledge transmission channels.

John K. Shank and Vijay Govindarajan are professors at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College. A frequent charge in recent years has been that many firms fall [...]

The compensation of profit center managers (PCMs) was examined in terms of how it is affected by market, political and human capital factors, as well as how much of it is salary and how much is bonus. The data analyzed for the study came from annual compensation surveys conducted from 1982 to 1986, which covered 1,684 observations gathered from 322 companies and involved 524 PCMs. The results supported ten of the eleven hypotheses offered. It was shown that PCM compensation positively correlated with firm size, profit center size, relative firm size, firm tenure, job tenure, age and education. Bonus ratio also proved to have a positive correlation with firm performance and age. No evidence was found to show that firm size was negatively correlated with bonus ratio.

Virtually all research on strategic control within multinational corporations (MNCs) has focused on macro differences in control systems and processes across entire MNCs. Taking a less macro (i.e., subsidiary-specific contingency perspective), this article examines how, within the same corporation, the nature of corporate control might also vary systematically across subsidiaries. Differences in subsidiary contexts are analyzed along two dimensions: (a) the extent to which the subsidiary is a user of knowledge from the rest of the corporation and (b) the extent to which the subsidiary is a provider of such knowledge to the rest of the corporation. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The article presents methods for managing conflicts between partners during the innovation initiative process. These include dividing the labor, assembling a dedicated team, and mitigating likelihood for any potential conflict.

About innovation, it could be said that in the beginning there is the idea, and in the end, all too often, there still is the idea and only the idea. The reason is that successful innovation is based on both an idea and execution. As these authors state, 'the idea is only Chapter 1.' Moreover, a new company spawned by the established company must forget the latter's formula for success and its way of doing business. NewCo must forget, borrow and learn., Strategy used to be about protecting existing competitive advantage, but not any more. Today it is about finding the next advantage. The truth is that every strategy starts to decay [...]

The impact of organizational structure, on business innovation, is examined.

Successful teams strive to build trust and overcome barriers of geography, language and culture. Every global company's competitive advantage depends on its ability to coordinate critical resources and information that [...]

To sustain competitive advantage, a company must give people incentives to transfer their knowledge. A look at the innovative steel company Nucor and others suggests how to build a knowledge-sharing [...]

This study focused on what is perhaps the most critical aspect of strategy implementation in large, multibusiness organizations: recognizing that different business units within the same corporation often pursue different strategies and that the administrative mechanisms that corporate headquarters use to manage those businesses should differ. This study compared the results of bivariate and systems approaches to fit. Implications of the results for theory development and managerial practice are discussed. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The practice of sharing resources with related strategic business units (SBUs), although popular among American corporations, does not always yield improved performance. Resource sharing is most effective when the corporate strategy is focused on reducing operating costs, rather than differentiating company products. Resource sharing tends to have a negative impact on managerial job satisfaction, because it lessens executive autonomy. A contingency approach to determining management incentives is more effective than a structured, pre-established approach.

Corporations involved in several business segments are analyzed from a managerial standpoint to assess the effectiveness of decentralized forms of management with regard to various strategic business units. Three forms of decentralization are reviewed: the build-harvest concept of management, the differentiation-low cost concept of management, and the prospector-defender concept of management. The degree of decentralization, or the amount of autonomy, enjoyed by each strategic business unit is directly related to the business strategy of that unit and the strategy of the corporation as a whole. It is concluded that multiple organization strategies exist at every level of the corporation's hierarchy.

Project valuation using only cost-accounting techniques may neglect important strategic issues. In this article, the authors analyze the Baldwin bicycle case. First they apply traditional accounting techniques and arrive at one conclusion. Next they show that if strategic issues are explicitly incorporated a very different decision seems appropriate. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The effects of the choice of general manager on the success of a business unit strategy are examined. Results indicate that: managers with an internal locus of control and research and development experience contribute to better results in differentiation strategies and lesser results in low-cost strategies; 'feeling-type' managers with manufacturing experience increase performance in low-cost strategies but decrease performance in differentiation strategies; managers with general management and industrial experience have universally good results; and financial and accounting experience seems to have a negative effect on results.

Ideological change and technology revolution in the emerging global arena are examined.

Engagement in proactive performance-oriented feedback-seeking behavior was found to be positive among subsidiary presidents of multinational corporations (MNCs). Data taken from 374 subsidiaries of 75 MNCs reveal that engagement in such behavior among subsidiary presidents tend to vary. MNCs originating in Japan and Sweden exhibit a lower degree of engagement than those originating in the US and other European countries. Such phenomenon can be attributed to the two countries' internal environments which happen to be feedback-rich. Also, the face loss costs linked with proactive feedback-seeking tend to be high among Japanese and Swedish MNCs thereby limiting the participation of subsidiary managers in such type of behavior.