Harvard Business Review November - December 2017

When most of us think of augmented reality—if we think of it at all—we probably see Pokémon Go monsters or weird Snapchat filters. But AR, the technology that superimposes digital images on the physical world, is a lot more than a few cool apps. As Michael Porter, of Harvard Business School, and James Heppelmann, the CEO of PTC, explain in this issue’s Spotlight package, the technology is poised to reshape how we learn, make decisions, and operate within the physical world. The implications for business are both strategic and staggering: AR will “change how enterprises serve customers, train employees, design and create products, and...ultimately, how they compete.” Though still in its infancy, the technology is already being used to powerful effect. Organizations as diverse as Facebook, Amazon, GE, the U.S. Navy,…

When Steve Blank was planning a business trip to San Jose in 1978— he was an electrical engineer at the time—the travel agent initially booked a flight to San José, Costa Rica; he hadn’t heard of the one in Silicon Valley yet. When Steve arrived in California, he saw 43 pages of ads for engineering jobs in the Sunday newspaper, so he decided to stay. Since then he’s helped launch eight start-ups, and he now teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, Columbia, and UC Berkeley. In this issue he writes about how venture capitalists are giving “unicorn” founders too much control of boardrooms— and how to fix the problem. When he became the dean of research at IMD, N. Anand began an unwieldy project: reading all the articles and books written by current…

WHY CMOs NEVER LAST HBR ARTICLE BY KIMBERLY A. WHITLER AND NEIL MORGAN, JULY–AUGUST Something is amiss in the relationship between chief executives and their top marketing officers. Four-fifths of CEOs say they don’t trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs. Not surprisingly, CMOs have the briefest tenure in the C-suite, and the churn can mean serious internal business disruptions. To end this pattern, companies need to understand the three main roles that CMOs play: Some focus on strategy, some focus on commercialization, and some do both. It’s crucial to figure out which type of CMO a firm needs and tailor the duties and success metrics accordingly. This is a great piece, one every CEO and CMO should read—especially those in large companies. I would add that sometimes you can’t discern the marketing…

When the Swiss soft drink company Rivella was looking to launch new flavors in 2012, it used an open innovation platform to ask consumers for ideas and received 800 responses. As managers sorted through them, they noticed that one in particular— for a health-oriented ginger-flavored drink—appeared to be extremely popular. But on closer examination they saw that much of the buzz around it was coming from just a handful of participants who were working feverishly to elicit votes and comments. “It was a very small group of consumers who were rallying one another and generating a lot of noise,” says Silvan Brauen, who oversaw Rivella’s innovation pipeline. Despite the strong online feedback, the company concluded that the ginger flavor would flop in the market and abandoned the idea. That buzz is…

Silvan Brauen is the head of business development at Rivella, a leading Swiss manufacturer of soft drinks, which over the past five years has used open innovation to create new products. He recently spoke with HBR about the pros and cons of that approach. Edited excerpts follow. Why did you choose to crowdsource? We didn’t want a technology-driven innovation, where we add a random new flavor and hope that consumers like it. We wanted to go new ways and, most important, to start with consumer needs. How well does it work? Very well. When we first did this, in 2012, we received more than 800 ideas. They ranged from obvious ones we could have come up with ourselves to crazy ones, such as licoriceflavored drinks and strange colors. The diversity of ideas…

DR. KRUMER, DEFEND YOUR RESEARCH KRUMER: We looked at the performance of servers—who normally have an advantage—in every first set played at the 2010 French, U.S., and Australian Opens and at Wimbledon, and we found that the men’s performance deteriorated more than the women’s when the game was at a critical juncture. For example, in sets that went to 4–4, the number of men’s serves that were broken rose more than seven percentage points after the players had reached the tie. Among women, we saw barely any difference between pre- and post-tie performance. And even when female athletes’ play did deteriorate as pressure increased, the drop in performance was about 50% less, on average, than that of their male counterparts. So my coauthors—Danny Cohen-Zada and Mosi Rosenboim from Ben-Gurion University and…