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The case provides an example of an individual who meets harsh criticism, personal attacks, and broad resistance despite clear evidence that what he is proposing is right and could save the lives of thousands of human beings. The case recounts the story of Dr. Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, a pioneer in medical antiseptic procedures who is today known as “the savior of mothers.” In 1847, Semmelweis discovered that the practice of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics can effectively eliminate the outbreak of puerperal fever (“childbed fever”), a condition that killed up to 30 percent of mothers and babies in maternity clinics at the time of the case. The relatively short case – which is designed to be handed out during class – is divided into three parts. Part A describes the situation at Vienna General Hospital in 1846, when Semmelweis is assigned to head one of the two maternity clinics. Much of this part is dedicated to describing the natural experiment that Semmelweis encountered when learning that the two clinics had vastly different mortality rates. Part B lists the many hypotheses that Semmelweis had formulated and refuted, reports on his discovery that the contamination of women by doctors performing anatomical dissections of corpses is causing puerperal fever, and reveals his findings that it can be easily and effectively treated through hand disinfection. Part C provides an account of the resistance he faced from the medical establishment, despite the overwhelming evidence that Semmelweis had collected in support of his findings.

The case has the potential to be an eye-opening experience, as it describes a situation in which the protagonist of change is unable to convince the relevant community, despite having clear evidence: Semmelweis can prove that he is right, but instead of receiving recognition and gratitude and having his recommendations adopted, he meets resistance, personal attack, and ridicule. This is an important lesson for students, who often believe that change can effectively be brought to groups, organizations, and societies when there is clear evidence that proves the integrity of a new proposition.

Over the last 10 years, a basic shift has occurred from an IT-deployment view of the world of big systems and even bigger projects toward a people-centric and user-oriented view of hardware, information, and human collaboration and networking. Consumers have adapted rather quickly to this shift: If it is not useful, delete the app, the data, and the humans we choose not to network with. While consumers are free to pick and choose the technology they will buy, the information they will access, and the degree to which they will network and with whom, managers and employees within companies are more constrained by the processes, structures, functions, systems, and technology the company invests in and deploys over time. So we have a fundamental dilemma: How must leaders align and transform their legacy business to take full advantage how people, information, and IT capabilities can interact in a rapidly changing, digital world?

This paper studies the implications of upstream and/or downstream horizontal mergers on suppliers, retailers and consumers, in a bilateral oligopolistic system. We especially focus on market power and operational synergy benefits that such mergers engender. Starting with a benchmark pre-merger scenario in which firms compete on prices at each level, we find that the above two consequences individually almost have opposite effects on the merging and non-merging firms’ optimal decisions/profits after a merger. Furthermore, even though the effects of upstream and downstream mergers are different, the vertical supply chain partners will always try to reduce their losses if the market power effect dominates, but will take actions that improve their profits if the synergy effect is stronger. The above results are robust enough to hold even when taking into account intra-brand competition among retailers.

With permission of Elsevier

This paper reviews the substantial body of work on corporate social responsibility (CSR), including the synonymous domains of cause-related marketing and ethical consumption, to synthesizes the diverse findings on consumer responses to CSR. CSR is capable of engendering a range of company-favoring perceptions and behaviors, driven by both consumers’ CSR-related motivations (e.g., consumer-company identification, affective motives) and their CSR-guided product perceptions. As well, the paper documents the plethora of CSR initiative-, company-, and consumer-specific factors that modulate consumers’ reactions to CSR initiatives, and ends with a discussion of some key future research directions.

With permission of Elsevier

We analyze innovation incentives when firms can invest either in increasing the product's value (value-increasing innovation) or in increasing the hidden prices they collect from naive consumers (exploitative innovation). We show that if firms cannot return all profits from hidden prices by lowering transparent prices, innovation incentives are often stronger for exploitative than for value-increasing innovations, and are strong even for non-appropriable innovations. These results help explain why firms in the financial industry (e.g. credit-card issuers) have been willing to make innovations others could easily copy, and why these innovations often seem to have included exploitative features.

Copyright © 2015 by the American Economic Association.

Remote monitoring technology (RMT) is widely acknowledged as an important enabler of servitization however, there is a dearth of understanding about how RMT is used by manufacturing firms to support servitized strategies. This paper aims to contribute to this important yet somewhat ignored topic in servitization research. It attempts to address the following questions: What has constrained, and what has enabled the exploitation of RMT in the context of servitized strategies? The research adopts an exploratory multiple-case study design. Four in-depth descriptive case studies of companies operating in aerospace, industrial equipment, marine, and transport sectors were conducted. The collected data was analysed and synthesised, drawing out conclusions.

With permission of Emerald

The “variance hypothesis” predicts that external search breadth leads to innovation outcomes, but people have limited attention for search and cultivating breadth consumes attention. How does individuals' search breadth affect innovation outcomes? How does individuals' allocation of attention affect the efficacy of search breadth? We matched survey data with complete patent records, to examine the search behaviors of elite boundary spanners at IBM. Surprisingly, individuals who allocated attention to people inside the firm were more innovative. Individuals with high external search breadth were more innovative only when they allocated more attention to those sources. Our research identifies limits to the “variance hypothesis” and reveals two successful approaches to innovation search: “cosmopolitans” who cultivate and attend to external people and “locals” who draw upon internal people.

© 2014 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.