How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy. The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts. Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.

Strategy is becoming more 'open' - more transparent and more inclusive. Opening Strategy tells the story of how corporate strategists and strategy consultants have worked since the middle of the last century to open up the strategy process. First strategic planning, then strategic management, and now 'open strategy' have all brought more people into the strategy process and provided more strategic information, for the benefit of both business and society at large. Informed by interviews with corporate strategists and consultants at leading firms such as General Electric and McKinsey & Co, and drawing on the historical archives of strategy's pioneers, this book provides vivid insights into the trials and tribulations of practice change in the strategy profession. Above all, it stresses the hard work of the little recognized and sometimes eccentric individuals who have been leaders in practice change. By building on a wide range of illustrations, covering both successes and failures, the book draws out general lessons for practice innovation in strategy. Those studying the topic will be able to set standard strategy techniques in historical and social context and develop new areas for investigation, while practising executives and consultants should gain a sense of how to innovate in strategy - and how not to.

Making strategy requires undertaking major—often irreversible—decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts. Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist. This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.

How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy. The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts. Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.

The first of its kind, this Handbook mobilizes research on an emerging phenomenon, Open Strategy. As new technologies and societal pressures have precipitated employees, business partners, shareholder groups and other stakeholders into deeper involvement in strategy, various Open Strategy initiatives now promise greater transparency and inclusion in the strategy process. Providing a wide-ranging introduction to the concept of Open Strategy and its various dimensions, the chapters of this Handbook detail key practices, discuss the roles of technology, and propose various theoretical perspectives for researching Open Strategy. Finally, this Handbook addresses the ongoing challenges and politics involved in Open Strategy. It will appeal to organization and strategy scholars, master's students in business and management, practitioners, such as consultants and strategy staff in established firms, and anyone concerned with new trends in strategy development and its implications for organizations and their members.

It's a plain fact: regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. Open source offers the possibility of bringing more innovation into your business by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the business. The key is developing a web-driven community where new types of collaboration and creativity can flourish. Since 1998 Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel have been helping groups at Sun Microsystems understand open source and advising them on how to build successful communities around open source projects. In this book the authors present lessons learned from their own experiences with open source, as well as those from other well-known projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla.* Winner of 2006 Jolt Productivity Award for General Books* Describes how open source development works and offers persuasive reasons for using it to help achieve business goals.* Shows how to use open source in day-to-day work, discusses the various licenses in use, and describes what makes for a successful project.* Written in an engaging style for executives, managers, and engineers that addresses the human and business issues involved in open source development as well as its history, philosophy, and future

How a flexible and creative approach to intellectual property can help an organization accomplish goals ranging from building market share to expanding an industry. Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization's intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In this book, intellectual property expert and Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey offers a short briefing on intellectual property strategy for corporate managers and nonprofit administrators. Palfrey argues for strategies that go beyond the traditional highly restrictive “sword and shield” approach, suggesting that flexibility and creativity are essential to a profitable long-term intellectual property strategy—especially in an era of changing attitudes about media. Intellectual property, writes Palfrey, should be considered a key strategic asset class. Almost every organization has an intellectual property portfolio of some value and therefore the need for an intellectual property strategy. A brand, for example, is an important form of intellectual property, as is any information managed and produced by an organization. Palfrey identifies the essential areas of intellectual property—patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret—and describes strategic approaches to each in a variety of organizational contexts, based on four basic steps. The most innovative organizations employ multiple intellectual property approaches, depending on the situation, asking hard, context-specific questions. By doing so, they achieve both short- and long-term benefits while positioning themselves for success in the global information economy.

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

Two foreign policy experts chart a new American grand strategy to meet the greatest geopolitical challenges of the coming decade This ambitious and incisive book presents a new vision for American foreign policy and international order at a time of historic upheaval. The United States’ global leadership crisis is not a passing shock created by the Trump presidency or COVID-19, but the product of forces that will endure for decades. Amidst political polarization, technological transformation, and major global power shifts, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper convincingly argue, only a grand strategy of openness can protect American security and prosperity despite diminished national strength. Disciplined and forward-looking, an openness strategy would counter authoritarian competitors by preventing the emergence of closed spheres of influence, maintaining access to the global commons, supporting democracies without promoting regime change, and preserving economic interdependence. The authors provide a roadmap for the next president, who must rebuild strength at home while preparing for novel forms of international competition. Lucid, trenchant, and practical, An Open World is an essential guide to the future of geopolitics.

This book offers the reader a novel perspective on how digital contexts and open strategy approaches – the act of opening up strategic initiatives beyond company managers to involve front-line employees, stakeholders, and entrepreneurs – are related. Going beyond the claim that digital media drives open strategy by containing a detailed analyses of the interrelations between the two, the authors examine how ICT have diffused globally and trace the emerging links between digitally driven environments and open strategizing approaches. This book also draws a general picture of how and why digital technologies create new networks. A more competitive, transparent, empowered, and inclusive environment would enhance development and encourage novel approaches to strategies implemented. Real-life exemplifications of how and why digital technologies contribute to open strategizing are also provided. Various drivers impacting the necessity to develop more relational advantage are discussed and intertwined with the description of challenges observed in the case of imposing openness. A useful resource for researchers of strategic management and information systems, as well as those looking at digital strategy and transformation.