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The authors explore the potential of machine learning, computers employ that an algorithm to sort data, make decisions and then continuously assess and improve their functionality. They suggest that it be used to power a radical redesign of company processes that they call machine reengineering.

The authors interpret a survey of more than a thousand corporate public agency IT professionals on their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Companies that embrace machine learning find that it adds value to the work product of their employees and provides companies with new capabilities.

Working together with an intelligent machine, workers become custodians of powerfully smart tools, tools that personalize work to maximize their most productive ways of working.

A guide to establishing a culture that empowers employees to thrive alongside intelligent machines.

The purpose of this paper is to help organisations implement change more effectively. One key to this process is communication. The paper suggests a series of critical questions designed to help initiators of change develop a strategic communication plan. Four stages of the planning process are discussed: contextual analysis, audience analysis, strategic design and tactical development. A case study is presented in which the planning model was used as a focal point for a reengineering project.

In the almost twenty years since Vasarhelyi and Halper (1991) reported on their pioneering implementation of what has come to be known as Continuous Auditing (CA), the concept has increasingly moved from theory into practice. A 2006 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that half of all responding firms use some sort of CA techniques, and the majority of the rest plan to do so in the near future. CA not only has an increasing impact on auditing practice, but is also one of the rare instances in which such a significant change was led by the researchers. In this paper we survey the state of CA after two decades of research into continuous auditing theory and practice, and draw out the lessons learned by us in recent pilot CA projects at two major firms, to examine where this unique partnership between academics and auditors will take CA in the future.

A new management philosophy, based on the importance of creativity and individual initiative, is replacing the familiar model that sees the individual as a cog in the corporate machine.

Forecasting based on measurement and control is losing its relevance as a tool for successful planning and organizational management. In the new business climate an understanding of chaos and complexity theory will be the key to winning performance.

The paper presents results of a pilot programme aimed at efficiency improvement in a multi‐site factories system for automotive component production. Firstly, the company background has been outlined and main problems of the old manufacturing system have been examined. In order to increase competitiveness in global and turbulent markets a renewed organization approach has been proposed based on total manufacturing management and just‐in‐time methodologies. Improvements in set‐up and lead times, work in progress, material handling, product and process quality, environmental effects, have all been assessed, keeping a quite low project cost (around $4 million).

Ownership and location decisions are at the core of the development of multinational enterprises (MNEs) as they deeply impact the creation and appropriation of value in global value chains. Such decisions have been treated by extant literature mostly as oppositions characterized by trade-off alternatives, such as internalization versus externalization and domestic versus offshoring. In this chapter, we discuss the development of a multinational company, that is, De’Longhi, as it has adjusted both ownership and location choices several times over the last 15 years. The case shows that in growing firms, such as De’Longhi, ownership and location decisions are interrelated among each other and with several factors including: interdependences between value chain activities, corporate strategy, organizational culture and the time horizon of the above choices.

This paper aims to explore the true sources of innovation that revolutionized two sports industries – skiing and tennis, tracking the flow of ideas and power of technology brokering through the eyes of the innovator, Howard Head.

Using a focal innovation action-set framework, the authors unite heretofore-disparate pieces of information to paint a more complete picture of the innovation and technology brokering process. Primary source material from Head’s patents, personal memoirs and journals and documented correspondence between him, his brother and his colleagues are augmented with secondary source material from periodicals, media excerpts and the academic literature.

Head stands as an exemplar example of a technology broker, both through his serial practice of recombinant innovation and his savvy exploitation of resources. Results discredit the Great Man Theory of Innovation, while emphasizing the importance of exploiting social capital to realize opportunities.

This paper is the first to offer detailed insight into the technology brokering and innovation processes that revolutionized the tennis and skiing industries. It is novel in that it is one of very few papers to challenge the Great Man Theory of Innovation propagated by many textbooks and mass media, explores the process of technology brokering from the broker’s perspective rather than organizationally and uses focal innovation action-set methodology to complement a historical biographical sketch of innovativeness relative to sports equipment and machines.