FEATURES
Managing Organizations
The Edison of Medicine
Lessons from one of the world’s most productive and profitableresearch facilities.
Steven Prokesch
Early-stage research is expensive, risky,and unpredictable—so corporations generally shy away from it, leaving manyopportunities unexplored. They could revitalize their research operations byadopting the approach taken by Bob Langer, a chemical engineer whose lab at MITis one of the most productive and profitable research facilities in the world.
HBR senior editor Prokesch reports in depthon Langer Lab’s proven formula for accelerating the pace of discoveries andgetting them into the world as products. It includes:
• a focus on high-impact projects—ones that could make a major difference tosociety
• a process for crossing the proverbial “valley of death” between research andcommercial development
• methods for facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration
• ways to make the constant turnover of researchers and the limitedduration of project funding a plus
• aleadership style that balances freedom and support
By drawing on the Langer Lab values andmodel, companies could make the world a better place and make lots of money inthe process.
HBR Reprint R1702L
FEATURES
innovation
How to Get Ecosystem Buy-In
Martin Ihrig and Ian C. MacMillan
In many industries today—including aerospace, electronics,chemicals, software, global construction, global investment and commercialbanking, and international manufacturing—even simple product or serviceinnovations can become complicated, because so many companies now operate inecosystems made up of powerful and highly interconnected stakeholders. Thatmeans you can’t focus exclusively on the customer and yourself: You need valuepropositions that stakeholders in your ecosystem can also buy into, whichvastly complicates the process of identifying innovation opportunities. Theauthors have developed a tool-based ideation process that a major pharmaceuticalcompany has rolled out worldwide. They describe the six steps in the process:(1) Identify key stakeholders and their most pressing needs; (2) outlinestakeholder consumption chains; (3) categorize features of the current offerand build offer profiles; (4) create growth opportunity profiles; (5) mapstakeholder tensions; and (6) choose your best opportunity.
HBR Reprint R1702G
FEATURES
sales
The New Sales Imperative
Nicholas Toman, Brent Adamson, and CristinaGomez
piling on information just makes things harder.
B2B customers are deeply uncertain andstressed. With virtually infinite information available on any solution, aswelling raft of stakeholders involved in each purchase, and an ever-expandingarray of options, customers are increasingly overwhelmed and often moreparalyzed than empowered. The authors’ solution, developed through work withhundreds of sales organizations globally, is a proactive, take-chargeprescriptive approach that sweeps away obstacles and guides customers throughdecision making. Companies that have mastered prescriptive selling share a setof practices: They work to understand customers’ purchase journeys; identifysignificant customer challenges at each buying stage; arm their sellers withtools to help overcome each challenge; and track customers’ purchase progressso that they can intervene to keep the process on track.
HBR Reprint R1702J
How I Did It
Marketing
The CEO of Bolthouse Farms on MakingCarrots Cool
Jeffrey Dunn
When Dunn became the CEO of Bolthouse, in2008, he had 20 years’ experience in the soft drinks industry. If Coca-Colacould persuade people to drink more than a billion servings of its soda everyday, he wondered, why couldn’t Bolthouse do the same for a vegetable? He andhis team decided to use some of the tactics of junk food companies, which areexperts in demand creation.
“Eat ’Em Like Junk Food,” Bolthouse’smultimillion-dollar marketing campaign, used tongue-in-cheek TV, print, anddigital ads to liken baby carrots to Cheetos, Doritos, and other snack foodfavorites. The company put its products in vending machines, used Sesame Streetcharacters on its packaging, and sold through retailers such as Walmart and7-Eleven. It created carrot snack packs, developed 27 varieties of juices andsmoothies, and put veggie and fruit purees in squeezable tubes. And itattracted the attention of Campbell’s, which acquiredBolthouse in 2012.
HBR Reprint R1510A