...Chapter 1 / Foundations of Information Systems in Business ● 27 REAL WORLD CASE 2 lmost everybody has a theory about how to save the U.S. newspaper industry. The only consensus, it seems, is that it needs to change fundamentally or it could all but disappear. At The New York Times, tough times have elevated IT-enabled innovation to the top of the agenda. A research and development group, created in 2006, operates as a shared service across nearly two dozen newspapers, a radio station, and more than 50 Web sites. “Our role is to accelerate our entry onto new platforms by identifying opportunities, conceptualizing, and prototyping ideas,” explains Michael Zimbalist, the company’s vice president of R&D. Zimbalist’s staff of 12 includes experts in rapid prototyping, specialists in areas like mobile or cloud computing and data miners who probe Web site data for insight into what visitors do. They work within a common framework based on idea generation, development, and diffusion throughout the business. Recent projects included prototypes for new display ad concepts, as well as BlackBerry applications for Boston.com and the expert site About.com. The team’s work is intended to supplement and support innovation taking place within the business units. For example, the team is prototyping E-Ink, an emerging display technology; some business units can’t spare the resources to investigate it. At NYTimes.com, the design and product development group of Marc Frons, CTO of...
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...presents two companies, The New York Times, a publishing company and Boston Scientific, engaged in the field of medical equipment and health; that use information technology in different ways to foster innovation and maintain an edge in their respective industries. The New York Times used a shared service across nearly two dozen newspapers, a radio station and more than 50 web sites. Its role is to accelerate entry onto new platforms by identifying opportunities, conceptualizing, and prototyping ideas. They also partner with other companies such as Netflix to produce an interactive map that shows most popular Netflix rentals. New York Times have also been able to come up with other products like Times Widgets, and Time Wire. Boston scientific on the other hand creates a machine Goldfire software that provides the right mix of openness and security for data to enable employees share information. The main goal is to have any engineer to be able to access the research of their colleagues. This is getting achieved without throwing security out the window. Q1 According to Wikipedia, Shared services refers to the provision of a service by one part of an organization or group where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Shared services are dedicated units structured as centralized point of service and is focused on defined business functions. These are similar to collaboration which might take place between different organizations...
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...Long Range Planning 41 (2008) 378e394 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/lrp Innovation Games: A New Approach to the Competitive Challenge ´ Roger Miller, Xavier Olleros and Luis Molinie Innovation is often perceived as an unmanageable phenomenon. Bets are placed on new products with the hope that a few winners will compensate for the many losers. At best, sophisticated selection procedures impose a certain discipline and provide guidance for containing costly errors. The research that we have conducted yields a more nuanced view. Innovation, we have found, becomes manageable when managers move away from universalistic prescriptions and recognise that different rules and practices apply in different contexts. Our main argument is that both executives and public officials need to learn from the new realities of innovation. Instead of being a uniform process, innovation takes place in seven distinct ‘games’, focusing on market creation, market maintenance and innovator support. Rules for managing innovation are neither generic best practices that can be applied universally, nor narrow industry-specific recipes. Instead, distinct contexts call for specific strategies and rules to create and capture market value. Thus, innovation games are not predetermined sets of rules but leave ample room for creative competition and collaboration. Our approach urges business executives and academics to reassess the validity of conventional approaches, no matter how well established. Managers...
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...(2006) 6: 57–73 DOI: 10.1007/s10660-006-5988-7 Community based innovation: How to integrate members of virtual communities into new product development Johann Fuller · Michael Bartl · Holger Ernst · ¨ Hans Muhlbacher ¨ C Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006 Abstract Online consumer groups represent a large pool of product know-how. Hence, they seem to be a promising source of innovation. At present, except for open source software, little is known about how to utilize this know-how for new product development. In this article we explore if and how members of virtual communities can be integrated into new product development. We explain how to identify and access online communities and how to interact with its members in order to get valuable input for new product development. This approach we term “Community Based Innovation.” The Audi case illustrates the applicability of the method and underscores the innovative capability of consumers encountered in virtual communities. Keywords Online communities . User innovations . New product development . Virtual customer integration Customers’ wants and their acquired knowledge through the actual use of products make them an essential external resource for new product development (NPD) [12, 13, 37, 47, 65, 57, 71]. Some customers are not only knowledgeable but also able to develop their own new products [22, 50, 58, 67, 69]. Such innovative customers can be found in online communities J. F¨ ller u University of Innsbruck...
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...Applications Module I Development Processes Information Technologies Foundation Concepts FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN BUSINESS Ch apt er Highligh t s L ea r n i n g O bj ect i v e s Section I Foundation Concepts: Information Systems in Business 1. Understand the concept of a system and how it relates to information systems. 2. Explain why knowledge of information systems is important for business professionals, and identify five areas of information systems knowledge that they need. 3. Give examples to illustrate how the business applications of information systems can support a firm’s business processes, managerial decision making, and strategies for competitive advantage. 4. Provide examples of several major types of information systems from your experiences with business organizations in the real world. 5. Identify several challenges that a business manager might face in managing the successful and ethical development and use of information technology in a business. 6. Provide examples of the components of real world information systems. Illustrate that in an information system, people use hardware, software, data, and networks as resources to perform input, processing, output, storage, and control activities that transform data resources into information products. 7. Demonstrate familiarity with the myriad of career opportunities in information systems. The Real World of Information Systems Real World Case: eCourier, Cablecom...
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...New Medical Devices in the US August 13 2010 Table of Contents 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2 2. Background and Framework……………………………………………………………………………………………………………4 2.1 Priority Medical Devices for the Netherlands…..……………………………………………………………………4 2.2 The US Vision: From see and treat to predict and prevent……………………………………………………6 2.3 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..7 3. Medical device sector in the US………………………………………………………………………………………………………8 3.1 Economic Impact…..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………8 3.2 The Sector by State…..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………10 3.3 Key Institutes: Patent Applications in the Cluster Areas…..………………………………………………….13 3.4 Conclusions…..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….20 4. Turning research into novel medical devices………………………………………………………………………………….22 4.1 The Medical Device Development Process…..……………………………………………………………………..22 4.2 CIMIT: A Structure for Medical Device Innovation…..………………………………………………………….23 4.3 Stanford Biodesign: Innovation as a Discipline…..………………………………………………………………..26 4.4 Conclusions and Recommendations…..……………………………………………………………………………….28 5. Summary and Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….30 6. Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….32 7. References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….33 Appendices A1 Selection of Key Institutes A2 Results Patent Analysis A3 Research...
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...The History of Information Technology March 2010 Draft version to appear in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 45, 2011 Thomas Haigh thaigh@computer.org University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Thomas Haigh The History of Information Technology – ARIST Draft 2 In many scholarly fields the new entrant must work carefully to discover a gap in the existing literature. When writing a doctoral dissertation on the novels of Nabokov or the plays of Sophocles, clearing intellectual space for new construction can be as difficult as finding space to erect a new building in central London. A search ensues for an untapped archive, an unrecognized nuance, or a theoretical framework able to demolish a sufficiently large body of existing work. The history of information technology is not such a field. From the viewpoint of historians it is more like Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century (Cronon, 1991). Building space is plentiful. Natural resources are plentiful. Capital, infrastructure, and manpower are not. Boosters argue for its “natural advantages” and promise that one day a mighty settlement will rise there. Speculative development is proceeding rapidly and unevenly. But right now the settlers seem a little eccentric and the humble structures they have erected lack the scale and elegance of those in better developed regions. Development is uneven and streets fail to connect. The native inhabitants have their ideas about how things should be done, which sometimes...
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...This paper draws together knowledge from a variety of fields to propose that innovation management can be viewed as a form of organisational capability. Excellent companies invest and nurture this capability, from which they execute effective innovation processes, leading to innovations in new product, services and processes, and superior business performance results. An extensive review of the literature on innovation management, along with a case study of Cisco Systems, develops a conceptual model of the firm as an innovation engine. This new operating model sees substantial investment in innovation capability as the primary engine for wealth creation, rather than the possession of physical assets. Building on the dynamic capabilities literature, an “innovation capability” construct is proposed with seven elements. These are vision and strategy, harnessing the competence base, organisational intelligence, creativity and idea management, organisational structures and systems, culture and climate, and management of technology. Keywords: innovation, dynamic capabilities, Cisco, new technology Introduction Ask many of today’s CEOs and they are likely to tell you that the ability to develop new ideas and innovations is one of the top priorities of their organisations (Porter, 377 378 B. Lawson & D. Samson Stern & Council on...
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...------------------------------------------------- Innovation From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see Innovation (disambiguation). Innovation is a new idea, device or process.[1] Innovation can be viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs.[2] This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and society. The term innovation can be defined as something original and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society.[3] While a novel device is often described as an innovation, in economics, management science, and other fields of practice and analysis innovation is generally considered to be a process that brings together various novel ideas in a way that they have an impact on society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different rather than doing the same thing better. Contents [hide] * 1 Inter-disciplinary views * 1.1 Business and economics * 1.2 Organizations * 1.3 Sources of innovation * 1.4 Goals/failures * 1.5 Diffusion of innovation * 2 Measures ...
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...Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard Robert S. Kaplan Working Paper 10-074 Copyright © 2010 by Robert S. Kaplan Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard1 Robert S. Kaplan Harvard Business School, Harvard University 1 Paper originally prepared for C. Chapman, A. Hopwood, and M. Shields (eds.), Handbook of Management Accounting Research: Volume 3 (Elsevier, 2009). 1 Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard Abstract David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role in value creation (Nolan Norton Institute, 1991). Norton and I believed that if companies were to improve the management of their intangible assets, they had to integrate the measurement of intangible assets into their management systems. After publication of the 1992 HBR article, several companies quickly adopted the Balanced Scorecard giving us deeper and broader insights into its power and potential. During the next 15 years, as it was adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the...
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...® Acodemy of Management Heview 1993, Vol. 18, No. 3. 518-545. FOUCAULT. POWER/KNOWLEDGE. AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT BARBARA TOWNLEY The University of Alberta Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. I argue that human resource management (HRM) may be best understood as a discourse and set of practices that attempt to reduce the indeterminacy involved in the employment contract. Here I reread HRM practices from a Foucauldian power-knowledge perspective and suggest that this provides an avenue to reorient contemporary, historical, and comparative analyses of the area. A glimpse at human resource management (HRM) texts would seem to give light to a comment by Beer, Spector, Lawrence, Mills, and Walton (1984) that HRM is a series of seemingly disjointed activities. This notion echoes an earlier view of Baldamus (1961: 347) that what is encompassed by HRM's subject matter is "anything from supervision, incentives and profit sharing to machine-paced production, methods of training and employee selection." Often this heterogeneity is excused in terms of HRM's reflecting the ad hoc and reactive nature of its origins (Jacoby, 1985; Niven, 1967; Ozanne, 1967). What the heterogeneity of HRM highlights, however, is the importance of an organizing principle, or analytical focus, as opposed to common sense description, which gives HRM practices a theoretical coherence. HRM's heterogeneity stresses the importance of an order "that turns a set of bits, which have limited...
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...Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard Robert S. Kaplan Working Paper 10-074 Copyright © 2010 by Robert S. Kaplan Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard1 Robert S. Kaplan Harvard Business School, Harvard University 1 Paper originally prepared for C. Chapman, A. Hopwood, and M. Shields (eds.), Handbook of Management Accounting Research: Volume 3 (Elsevier, 2009). 1 Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard Abstract David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role in value creation (Nolan Norton Institute, 1991). Norton and I believed that if companies were to improve the management of their intangible assets, they had to integrate the measurement of intangible assets into their management systems. After publication of the 1992 HBR article, several companies quickly adopted the Balanced Scorecard giving us deeper and broader insights into its power and potential. During the next 15 years, as it was adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the...
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...competitions: a novel method to integrate users in new product development Frank T. Piller1,2 and Dominik Walcher1 TUM Business School, Technische Universitat Munchen, Leopoldstrasse 139, 80804 Munich, ¨ ¨ Germany. walcher@wi.tum.de 2 MIT Sloan School of Management, 50 Memorial Drive, E52-513, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. piller@mit.edu 1 Research has shown that many innovations originate not in the manufacturer but the user domain. Internet-based toolkits for idea competitions (TIC) are a novel way for manufacturers to access innovative ideas and solutions from users. Idea competitions build on the nature of competition as a means to encourage users to participate at an open innovation process, to inspire their creativity, and to increase the quality of the submissions. When the contest ends, submissions are evaluated by an expert panel. Users whose submissions score highest receive an award from the manufacturer, which is often granted in exchange for the right to exploit the solution in its domain. Following the idea of evolutionary prototyping, we developed a TIC in cooperation with a manufacturer of sports goods. The TIC was launched as a pilot in one of the company’s markets. Submissions were evaluated using the consensual assessment technique. The evaluation of this study provides suggestions for further research, but also implications for managers willing to explore TIC in their organization. 1. Introduction T o acquire information from (potential) customers about their...
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...doing so, and make a profit. The purpose of this article is to understand the significance of business models and explore their connections with business strategy, innovation management, and economic theory. Ó 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Introduction Developments in the global economy have changed the traditional balance between customer and supplier. New communications and computing technology, and the establishment of reasonably open global trading regimes, mean that customers have more choices, variegated customer needs can find expression, and supply alternatives are more transparent. Businesses therefore need to be more customer-centric, especially since technology has evolved to allow the lower cost provision of information and customer solutions. These developments in turn require businesses to re-evaluate the value propositions they present to customers e in many sectors, the supply side driven logic of the industrial era has become no longer viable. This new environment has also amplified the need to consider not only how to address customer needs more astutely, but also how to capture value from providing new products and services. Without a...
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...doing so, and make a profit. The purpose of this article is to understand the significance of business models and explore their connections with business strategy, innovation management, and economic theory. Ó 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Introduction Developments in the global economy have changed the traditional balance between customer and supplier. New communications and computing technology, and the establishment of reasonably open global trading regimes, mean that customers have more choices, variegated customer needs can find expression, and supply alternatives are more transparent. Businesses therefore need to be more customer-centric, especially since technology has evolved to allow the lower cost provision of information and customer solutions. These developments in turn require businesses to re-evaluate the value propositions they present to customers e in many sectors, the supply side driven logic of the industrial era has become no longer viable. This new environment has also amplified the need to consider not only how to address customer needs more astutely, but also how to capture value from providing new products and services. Without a...
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