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This case describes how Varian Medical Systems, the successor to one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley, created a business with $11.6 billion in market cap by listening to dreams of its physician customers and their scientist colleagues and finding ways to fulfill them over several decades.

A key business opportunity that spurred the company was to identify the most perceptive thought-leader customers, then bring them into a long-term, system-building partnership.

If companies envision the future and work with perceptive, far-sighted customers and others who will benefit from high-value innovation, together they stand a real chance of achieving a desired future.

Establish forums where perceptive, visionary customers meet with executives, marketers and key developers to identify what you should deliver in the immediate future and in years beyond.

The case described the practical steps the company took to implement customer participation in the innovation process over many decades.

New technologies may offer special opportunities for others to achieve very large returns with approaches to technology development like those of Amazon, Tesla, and Walmart. This paper summarizes those firms' overall approach and offers guidelines for carrying out similar efforts.

The paper is a multi-firm case study, examining long-term technology development processes of Amazon, Tesla, Walmart, Varian Medical, and Deere.

The firms were able to create huge amounts of value (or in Deere's case, seems to be creating a huge amount of value today) because their leaders recognized a huge problem that limited customers greatly and spent decades solving it with digital technology. The approach appears to be replicable by others.

This is an initial review. Further study of these firms and others that have similar long-term digital achievements is warranted.

The paper describes a practical approach to achieving sustained competitive advantage that may be effective for those willing to pursue solution to a large problem over many years.

The most successful users of digital technology have followed a difficult but straightforward path to revolutionizing customer experience: Focus for decades on making something important work really well. This paper identifies similarities among the long-term strategies of the greatest producers of long-term value for the first time and identifies a path through which others may follow them.

Explains (using a model and cases) how companies that lack a capability for continual strategic innovation can bring one into existence.

Author developed histories of how continual innovation emerged or failed to emerge in six firms, drew conclusions based on what worked in the successes.

Strategic innovation gets started with a five‐step process that involves improvising initial innovation processes, then learning from what was improvised.

Though the companies studied were selected to represent different industries and kinds of strategic innovation, the number was relatively small. Findings should be replicated in studies of more firms.

Instead of using standard organizational change models that call for clear goals that leaders can manage to, firms seeking repeated strategic innovation should create inspiring but necessarily vague goals, improvise first steps toward them, and encourage emergence of innovation routines based on what was improvised.

Provides an evidence‐based model of how to bring Continual Strategic Innovation into existence.

For half a century, experts have offered leaders a standard model of how to transform organizations. It involves unfreezing them, developing a clear picture of the future, managing to make the picture a reality, and then changing systems to support the new ways. However, studies have shown that transformation does not always follow this script. This paper aims to look at four alternatives.

This paper reviews more than 50 well documented transformations and compares them to both the standard model and non‐mainstream ideas about transformation

The paper offers a guide to five distinct, reproducible ways of radically altering organizations: the standard model process (“holism”), transformation through the ambidextrous form, transformation through acquisition/restructuring, the Collins “Good‐to‐great” process, an improvisational transformation process. Hybrid approaches are discussed.

Providing a comprehensive guide to corporate transformation is a problematic undertaking. The authors could not review every case study of transformation, so they cannot say with certainty that their list of documented transformation methods is all‐inclusive. However, their survey gave them good reason to believe these are the five best‐documented transformation processes.

The paper explains the important advantages of each approach to transformation that make it appropriate for particular purposes.

When organizations need radical change, leaders need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of all five well‐documented alternative paths to transformation.

This chapter introduces evolutionary neuroscience and its organizational applications, especially its usefulness for motivation analysis in macrolevel disciplines such as strategic management. Macrolevel organizational disciplines have mostly lacked a theory of motivation beyond self-interest assumptions, which fail to explain many important macrolevel organizational phenomena. Evolutionary neuroscience provides an empirically grounded, parsimonious perspective on the human brain and brain evolution which helps clarify the profound complexities of motivation. Evolutionary neuroscience’s theory of the physiological causes of self- and other-interested motivation can support better macrolevel motivation analysis and unify disparate, potentially conflicting motivation theories. Examples are offered of how neuroscience-based motivation theory can support more comprehensive strategic management analysis of competences and competitive advantage.

The authors examine the approach by which Sam Walton, a 48-year-old when he took his first technology course, drove creation of a new set of technology for retailing.

By breaking Walton’s approach into five stages, the authors show how his way of working points to a credible path for leaders with limited background in technology to lead technological change.

Senior leaders can apply Walton’s systematic way of leading for creation of excellent processes to accomplish customer-focused technology innovation in the modern era.

Five elements of Walton’s tech innovation leadership are reviewed and analyzed.

This article offers insights about how Walton was able to form a tech savvy team of managers and synthesize a vision about the potential of technology to produce operational breakthroughs far in advance of his competition.