What new products or services should you launch next year? How can you improve the productivity of a paint line? What should you name your new venture? How can you decrease patient waiting times? How can you improve the customer experience? Pretty much any creative problem-solving task can be framed as seeking a new match between solution and need, from operational process improvements to creating strategies to foster organic growth. Innovation tournaments aim to find a match that is not just good, but exceptional. Leveraging more than two decades of experience organizing innovation tournaments in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, from Buenos Aires to Kuwait City, Shanghai to Moscow, and with many Fortune 500 companies, two renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and the foremost experts on innovation tournaments offer a template that you can use to generate winning ideas that will drive great outcomes—whatever your challenges, whatever your business. In The Innovation Tournament Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Exceptional Solutions to Any Challenge, Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich offer an engaging, often humorous, and always actionable guide to help you learn: --How to frame and articulate your specific innovation challenge --How to decide on the right format, structure, and strategic direction for your own innovation tournament --How to maximize the quality of the opportunities that will compete --How to select the very best ideas --How to develop those ideas into real-world opportunities --How to use tournaments to foster a culture of innovation Fast-reading and filled with real-world successes, The Innovation Tournament Handbook is a comprehensive roadmap to finding a new match between a solution and a need that is not merely good, but exceptional.

Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

This text presents a set of product development techniques aimed at bringing together the marketing, design, and manufacturing functions of the enterprise. The integrative methods facilitate problem-solving and decision-making.

If Amazon can't win in China, can anyone? When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos visited China in 2007, he expected that one day soon China would be a double-digit percentage of Amazon's sales. Yet, by 2019, Amazon, the most powerful and successful ecommerce company in the world, had quit China. In Winning in China: 8 Stories of Success and Failure in the World's Largest Economy, Wharton experts Lele Sang and Karl Ulrich explore the success and failure of several well-known companies, including Hyundai, LinkedIn, Sequoia Capital, and InMobi, as more and more businesses look to reap profits from the demand of 1.4 billion people. Sang, Global Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ulrich, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Wharton School, answer four critical questions: Which factors explain the success (or failure) of foreign companies entering China?What challenges and pitfalls can a company entering China expect to encounter? How can a prospective entrant realistically assess its chances? Which managerial decisions are critical, and which approaches are most effective? Sang and Ulrich answer these questions by examining the stories of eight well-known and respected companies that have entered China. They study: How Norwegian Cruise Line's entry into China displays how cultural differences can boost or sink different companies; How Intel, one of the oldest, most respected firms in Silicon Valley, thrived in a country that seems to favor agile upstarts; How Zegna, the Italian luxury brand, has emerged as another surprising success story and how it plans to navigate new headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic.Through these engaging and illuminating stories, Sang and Ulrich offer a framework and path for organizations looking for a way to successfully enter the world's largest economy. History can be a teacher, and China, a country with 3,500 years of written history, has much to teach.

In Essential Windows Workflow Foundation, two WF lead architects–Dharma Shukla and Bob Schmidt–offer an under-the-hood look at the technology, explaining the why and not just the how of WF’s key concepts and architecture. Serious WF developers seeking details about how to effectively utilize and extend the framework by writing activities will find cogent explanations and answers here. With simple and illustrative examples, the authors demonstrate exactly how to leverage WF’s extensible programming model to craft domain-specific programs. Drawing on their unique vantage point in designing and developing WF, Shukla and Schmidt deliver authoritative coverage of The core concepts and ideas that form the heart of WF’s programming model The execution model for activities, with details of the activity automaton, bookmarking, scheduling, and the threading model of the WF runtime Advanced execution concepts, including activity execution contexts, transactions, persistence points, passivation, fault handling, cancellation, compensation, and synchronization Hosting the WF runtime in applications The activity component model, with details of validation, compilation, serialization, and visualization Databinding, XAML, dependency properties, and WF program metadata Declarative conditions and rules, activity designers, and designer hosting Custom control flow patterns ranging from simple sequencing and iteration to more complex graphs and state machines Dynamic editing of running WF program instances Essential Windows Workflow Foundation is the definitive resource for developers seeking an in-depth understanding of this novel technology.

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.