MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan
From Harvard Business Review
It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the United States needs well-educated, technically skilled workers if it’s to remain competitive in the global marketplace. Just as obvious: We need a robust middle class with adequate disposable income and a sense that our economic system is working in a reasonably fair way. Yet business leaders and policy makers behave as if they don’t believe either of those things: Read More
MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson
There is a fundamental change underway in the way that companies make decisions. Instead of relying on a leader’s gut instincts, an increasing number of companies are embracing a new method that involves data-based analytics. This ‘Big Data’ revolution is occurring mainly because technology enables firms to gather extremely detailed information from and propagate knowledge to their consumers, suppliers, alliance partners, and competitors.
Companies that use this type of ‘data driven decision making’ actually show higher performance. Working with Lorin Hitt and Heekyung Kim, I analyzed 179 large publicly-traded firms and found that the ones that adopted this method are about 5% more productive and profitable than their competitors. Furthermore, the study found a relationship between this method and other performance measures such as asset utilization, return on equity and market value. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for companies that are able to use Big Data to their advantage. Read More
We are at the beginning of the Big Data era, and there is widespread anticipation that this will be a huge benefit to companies. I’ve been attending the World Economic Forum in Davos and in my `Data to Decisions’ panel we heard CEOs tell how Big Data can reinvent everything from CRM to internal processes to product design.
We also heard that there are significant challenges in data sourcing, permission agreements, data quality and of course privacy concerns, as most Big Data is personal data about customers. Fortunately these challenges can be addressed by conventional business practices.
Through a global survey conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group, we sought to determine where exactly sustainability sits on the management agendas of the more than 2,800 companies. It turns out that it’s prominent: more than two-thirds of companies have placed sustainability permanently on their management agenda.
Our study also found that two-thirds of companies see sustainability as necessary to being competitive in today’s marketplace, up from 55% a year earlier. In addition, two thirds of respondents said management attention to, and investment in, sustainability has increased in the last year.
MIT Sloan Assoc. Prof. Catherine Tucker
Much of the attention on Facebook’s initial public offering this week has been on whether the social networking giant is valued too highly. But whatever its current worth, Facebook has a potentially huge new source of revenue coming its way from “social advertising.” According to a new research paper I’ve just published, Facebook itself is only just beginning to realize the untapped potential of social advertising, in which marketers use online social relationships to improve ad targeting using data on Facebook users’ friend networks.
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