Managerial Articles - ivankavisnjic.com

The Legacy Company’s Guide to Innovation

Harvard Business Review, 2024

Many experts are urging established companies to radically innovate—and disrupt themselves before someone else does. The trouble is, large firms aren’t designed for moon shots. Their owners don’t like the risks and won’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. As a result, all too often they end up defaulting to incremental innovation.

But there is a solution: Incumbents can partner with entrepreneurial start-ups or with intrapreneurs that have ideas for breakthrough products. By doing that, they can leverage their significant resources while increasing the odds that those ideas will take off. This approach does require careful management, however. Drawing on the experiences of more than a dozen large multinationals, including Atlas Copco, Enel, and Epiroc, this article outlines a three-stage innovation process for incumbents to follow: First, set up numerous projects with multiple partners, nurturing them until their chances of success become clear. Next, once a venture has a breakthrough, gradually increase your commitment and help it remove roadblocks. Finally, when its business model is viable and it has a critical mass of customers, rapidly mobilize the resources it needs to scale up quickly.

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When Gradual Change Beats Radical Transformation

MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022

Transforming the organization to reap the benefits promised by advanced digital technologies is no longer a question of “if” or “when”; it’s a question of “how.” Business leaders are often counseled by expert advisers to set up a dedicated digital unit that “disrupts,” a driving change from the top that is executed on a grand scale.

That approach isn’t right for all companies, but there’s another way to successfully tackle this major change. Our research into digital transformation in industrial companies shows that the best approach in many cases is not revolutionary but evolutionary. We suggest that, depending on circumstances, that may be the better approach for organizations in other sectors as well.

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How Can Large Manufacturers Digitalize Their Business Models? A Framework for Orchestrating Industrial Ecosystems

California Management Review, 2021

For manufacturers, remaining competitive depends on their ability to digitalize their business models (i.e., offer digital and digitally enhanced products and services). To achieve this, they must engage with new digital partners and help their existing suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders to digitalize. Orchestrating this growing ecosystem

is challenging. Manufacturers struggle with this endeavor because of specific barriers associated with their existing legacy business model and related to their lack of digital vision, product-centric value chains, and a bias toward firm-centered profit formulas. To overcome these barriers, leading manufacturers have developed new approaches to ecosystem orchestration.

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Responding to a Potentially-Disruptive Technology: How Big Pharma Embraced Biotechnology

California Management Review, 2018

How do incumbent firms respond over time to a potentially disruptive technology? This article documents the strategies of 12 large pharmaceutical firms over 25 years as they addressed the opportunity/threat of biotechnology. All showed awareness of biotechnology’s potential, but their response profiles varied dramatically in terms of timing

(early/late) and focus (external/internal). Late movers mostly made large acquisitions to “catch up,” but early movers maintained their lead in terms of biotechnology-based drug sales and profitability, and those with a more “open” response profile performed better. This response involves a three-step process: building awareness (sensing), building capability (responding), and building commitment (scaling).

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La Nueva Empresa y su "Producto": Integrando Productos y Servicios a través de la Digitalización

Harvard Deusto Business Review, 2018

Desde hace décadas, las empresas que se definían por sus productos han evolucionado hacia la prestación de servicios, lo que ha adquirido una nueva dimensión con la prestación de estos servicios de próxima generación. Pero ¿cuáles son las estrategias que lo han hecho posible? Para las

empresas que históricamente fueron identificadas con unos productos, el cambio que ha hecho que sean ahora los servicios, y no los productos, la base de su cartera y su modelo de negocio no es ya, ni mucho menos, una estrategia nueva.

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Governing the City: Unleashing Value from the Business Ecosystem

California Management Review, 2016

Governing a city is arguably one of the most complex management tasks facing organizational leaders. Based on an analysis of Vienna, London, and Chicago, this article demonstrates that city leaders treat cities as ecosystems, structured and governed either as “extended enterprises” where inputs from specialized organizations are

coordinated and integrated into the final service or as “platform markets” where direct interactions between third-party service providers and citizens are facilitated by the city leaders. If cities are viewed as the “ecosystem of ecosystems,” then successful city governance requires an orchestration approach where leaders choose the appropriate structure and manage the ecosystem dynamically in a constantly changing environment.

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Steering Manufacturing Firms towards Service Business Model Innovation

California Management Review, 2013

Increasingly, manufacturing firms are turning to services as a new way of creating and capturing value. Despite the potential benefits, evidence suggests that many new product-service providers struggle to deploy service activities effectively, not least because they fail to reflect the presence of service activities in their performance

management systems (PMS). This paper reports the results of an in-depth case study, which examines how manufacturers can steer the transition towards services. Our findings suggest that manufacturing firms need to emphasize two separate but related dimensions of the market performance of service activities: ‘service adoption’, reflecting the proportion of customers who purchase the manufacturer’s services, and ‘service coverage’, signaling the range of service elements or the comprehensiveness of the service contract that customers opt for. These two indicators, reflecting service market performance, should be supplemented with a ‘complementarity index’ designed to disclose whether the relationship between products and services is reinforcing or substitutive. This is particularly important, since a common concern expressed by manufacturers is that increasing their service activities may cannibalize their product activities. Combined, these indicators allow manufacturing firms to deploy a service-based business model in an integrated and sustainable manner.

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