Beware the next big thing.

Innovative management ideas that bubble up in other companies pose a perennial quandary for leaders: Should you attempt to borrow new ideas, and if so, which ones and how? Even the most promising practices can be disastrous if they're transplanted into the wrong company, writes Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to borrow from innovative companies, he argues. The first, observe and apply, is the most commonly used approach for adopting new management ideas. It can and does work well, but only under Limited sets of circumstances: when the observed practice easily stands alone or involves just a small constellation of supporting behaviors (think of GE's well-regarded succession-planning process) and when a company's management model or way of thinking is very similar to the originator's (think of two software firms that both use the Agile development approach). The second method is to extract a management practice's essential principle-its underlying logic-and ask a series of questions to determine if it is right for your firm, including: How is your company different from the originating firm? Are the goals of the practice important to your organization? Many management innovations are launched with great fanfare, only to fade in popularity. With careful analysis, you can avoid falling prey to this hype cycle. And even if it turns out that a borrowed idea isn't right for you, the analysis will help you better understand your own management models and sharpen your practices.

The innovation value chain.

The challenges of coming up with fresh ideas and realizing profits from them are different for every company. One firm may excel at finding good ideas but may have weak systems for bringing them to market. Another organization may have a terrific process for funding and rolling out new products and services but a shortage of concepts to develop. In this article, Hansen and Birkinshaw caution executives against using the latest and greatest innovation approaches and tools without understanding the unique deficiencies in their companies' innovation systems. They offer a framework for evaluating innovation performance: the innovation value chain. It comprises the three main phases of innovation (idea generation, conversion, and diffusion) as well as the critical activities performed during those phases (looking for ideas inside your unit; looking for them in other units; looking for them externally; selecting ideas; funding them; and promoting and spreading ideas companywide). Using this framework, managers get an end-to-end view of their innovation efforts. They can pinpoint their weakest links and tailor innovation best practices appropriately to strengthen those links. Companies typically succumb to one of three broad "weakest-link" scenarios. They are idea poor, conversion poor, or diffusion poor. The article looks at the ways smart companies - including Intuit, P&G, Sara Lee, Shell, and Siemens- modify the best innovation practices and apply them to address those organizations' individual needs and flaws. The authors warn that adopting the chain-based view of innovation requires new measures of what can be delivered by each link in the chain. The approach also entails new roles for employees "external scouts" and "internal evangelists," for example. Indeed, in their search for new hires, companies should seek out those candidates who can help address particular weaknesses in the innovation value chain.

Scientific collaboration results in higher citation rates of published articles.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: The primary objective was to analyze the relationship between the citation rate of an article and the extent of collaboration. The secondary objective was to analyze the relationship between the number of authors/article and the number of institutions/article for the period of study. METHODS: We counted the number of original research articles published in six leading journals--Cell, Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and Journal of the American Medical Association--for the years 1975, 1985, and 1995. For each article, we determined the number of authors and the number of separate institutions. We also determined the number of times each article that was published in 1995 was cited in future scientific articles from the Science Citation Index database. RESULTS: Science, Cell, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and Journal of the American Medical Association had 2014, 868, 3856, 643, 785, and 465 total articles published/3-year study period, respectively. There was a median of 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, and 3 institutions/article, respectively. All of the final models had a significant linear author component for which all of the parameter estimates were positive, yet variable. Thus, the number of times an article was cited correlated significantly with the number of authors and the number of institutions. CONCLUSION: A correlation exists between the number of authors and the number of times an article is cited in other articles. Investigators who are open to collaborations and those who seem to adequately manage those collaborations produce a superior product that results in a higher impact.