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This article aims to offer executives specific guidance on how to tailor a successful innovation strategy to their individual company situation.

Based on Strategos' experience assisting clients in many industries to develop a core competence at innovation, the firm offers three practical guidelines.

The article finds that Strategos recommends: start with fresh perspectives; leave behind the old innovation paradigm by challenging three outdated assumptions that constrain innovation efforts; use “innovation architecture” to design your innovation program; map out what you need to do on the three critical dimensions of innovation – the “what”, the “who” and the “how.”; avoid seven pitfalls that can thwart the initiative; and learn from the experience of innovation pioneers as you implement your innovation program.

The article offers numerous case examples and step‐by‐step guidance.

The article identifies seven pitfalls and explains how to avoid them. These are: overly relying on customers to find solutions; generating ideas without new insights; assuming that innovation is about making a few “big bets”; failing to give innovators time, training and tools; confusing “involving many people” with “making it a free for all”; letting a systematic innovation process become bureaucratic; and failing to insist on sufficient involvement from the executive group.

Maps out what companies need to do on the three critical dimensions of innovation – the “what”, the “who” and the “how.”

This study has two objectives. The first aim is to ascertain whether innovation and market orientation have direct, indirect, and causal effects on customer service. The second objective is to ascertain whether market orientation has a moderating effect on the relationship between innovation and customer service. This research follows three distinct methodologies. The first approach uses Cronbach’s alpha coefficient in order to check reliability while an exploratory factor analysis and a confirmatory factory analysis ascertain validity. The second method uses the analysis of structural equation models to test a causal link between variables. The third methodology uses a moderated regression analysis to verify the moderating effects. As our analysis results show, intelligence generation and intelligence dissemination have a moderating effect on the relationship between innovation and flexibility. These results can be interpreted as follows: firstly, customs clearance firms can provide superior service to customers if they strive to understand customer needs and provide them with flexible service at the same time. Secondly, these firms can enhance their flexibility of service in all departments though innovation and information sharing acquired from the market.

Taguchi’s quality loss function is here proposed as a tool to evaluate costs connected to non conformity in manufacturing industries. First of all, Taguchi’s quadratic cost function is compared with the traditionally adopted zero defects cost function, and the differential effects of either function are analysed. Conceptual issues as well as practical ones are considered in this analysis. Results provided match in suggesting that the quadratic cost function, as compared with zero defects, is conceptually more consistent with the most advanced definitions of industrial quality and practically more suitable to support continuous improvement processes with a long‐term, customer‐oriented and profit‐oriented perspective. Yet, in order to provide for a full utilisation of this tool inside quality costs reporting systems, a number of problems have still to be resolved. These problems too are highlighted and brought to the attention of researchers of this field.

Strategic market planning for the multi‐product, multimarket firm is a particularly complex problem. The company may have many different products serving similar numbers of markets with widely different potentials. Some of the products may be in a strong position relative to competitors while others may be in a weak position. Each product will have its own strategy.

THE Government are planning to spend another odd million or two in running a “waste not, want not” campaign to ram down our throats. Just another example of officials being profilgate with taxpayers money, you may think.

The firm establishment of transatlantic Concorde operation provides a basis for a review of the last year and for a look at the future. Much has been spoken and written on the engineering and technological achievements of designing and producing Concorde and, perhaps less objectively, on the social and environmental factors which have aroused strong emotions for and against its operation. The author believes that the team expertise demanded by competitive airline operation is no less than that to be found in design and production. The review therefore makes no apology for presenting the airline aspects, problems and achievements of the British Airways Concorde operation.

The purpose of this study is to analytically extend the understanding of leadership styles and organisational coaching and their influence on organisational outcomes and workplace counterproductive behaviours within a non-Western context, i.e. the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In this study, a sample size of 656 participants from 14 different business sectors in the Emirates was used. The meta-analysis concept of latent variables and non-linear principal components analysis, along with the corresponding methodology of structural equation modelling, were implemented.

The study finds that organisational coaching has a significant positive effect on transactional leadership and has a significant influence on job alienation. Interestingly, coaching has a significant effect on commitment and counterproductive workplace behaviours. The detailed data analysis using F tests and independent t-tests, when applicable, indicated that there was a tendency for older employees to have more favourable attitudes towards transformational leadership or commitment but not towards coaching.

Despite the popularity of the presented topic in today's organisations, research in a Middle East context has not kept pace with its counterpart in Western areas of the world. The present study attempts to bridge the gap between Western theories in developed countries and under-researched Eastern countries, namely, the UAE, and to test the impact of leadership styles and organisational coaching and their influence on employee commitment and trust mediated by job bullying and job alienation.

Companies are increasingly changing their IT sourcing arrangements. Such changes often involve significant costs. The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain IT sourcing as a dynamic organizational phenomenon and to gain a deeper understanding of the drivers and outcomes of IT sourcing changes at organizational level.

A qualitative approach with interpretive analysis of historical data. Data are collected from companies through interviews and review of public documents where available.

The underlying tendencies of change are either primarily associated with institutional processes, or with what we term “IT‐driven” considerations. The perceived success of IT outsourcing in companies is dependent on these underlying tendencies.

This is an exploratory study and the findings on the underlying tendencies in change will be helpful in further theory development and research on IT outsourcing changes.

Knowledge coming from such research could help companies make more effective decisions about IT sourcing changes and set realistic expectations.

The dynamic perspective taken in this paper is different from the perspectives taken in earlier research where the researchers took cross‐sectional views of IT outsourcing arrangements. This paper shows the importance of re‐examining the reasons for change using the more encompassing concept of orientation.

During the last decade of the Twentieth Century the advanced North Atlantic economies performed in a markedly profitable way seen from the perspective of corporate business. This has neither led, however, to the impediment of a deepening social crisis, nor to the arrest of a crisis for liberal political values and norms of citizenship. On the contrary social exclusion was exacerbated, increasingly racialized and associated with immigrants and new visible ethnic minorities. A perhaps more conspicuous, but closely related, manifestation of this crisis of welfare and political values has, within the European Union, been the upturn of new nationalist, racist-populist political movements centered on the “problem of immigration.” This change of the political spectrum, brought about by the new right nationalist-populist upsurge, may eventually jeopardize the whole project of European integration, and the current tightening up of European regimes of both immigration and the societal incorporation of immigrants obviously reflects such worries. Simultaneously, however, influential employers, politicians and public servants have, time after time, cried out for the need for continued and increased large-scale import of low- as well as high-skilled migrant labor, seen as a remedy to Europe’s imminent “demographic crisis.”