Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation , Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.

The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive.

Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

Market-defining since it was first introduced, International Business 6e by Charles W. L. Hill, continues to set the standard for international business textbooks. In writing the book, Charles Hill draws on his experience in teaching, writing, and global consulting to create the most thorough, up-to-date, and thought-provoking text on the market. Because many issues in international business are complex, the text explores the pros and cons of economic theories, government policies, business strategies, organizational structures, etc. Hill's: International Business is known for its strong emphasis on strategy, and for maintaining a tight integrated flow between chapters. Hill's book is practical in nature, focusing on the managerial implications of each topic on the actual practice of international business. The author's passion and enthusiasm for the international business arena is apparent on every page as he strives to make important theories interesting, informative, and accessible to all students.

In 2010 world-renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen gave a powerful speech to the Harvard Business School's graduating class. Drawing upon his business research, he offered a series of guidelines for finding meaning and happiness in life. He used examples from his own experiences to explain how high achievers can all too often fall into traps that lead to unhappiness.
The speech was memorable not only because it was deeply revealing but also because it came at a time of intense personal reflection: Christensen had just overcome the same type of cancer that had taken his father's life. As Christensen struggled with the disease, the question "How do you measure your life?" became more urgent and poignant, and he began to share his insights more widely with family, friends, and students.
In this groundbreaking book, Christensen puts forth a series of questions: How can I be sure that I'll find satisfaction in my career? How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness? How can I avoid compromising my integrity—and stay out of jail? Using lessons from some of the world's greatest businesses, he provides incredible insights into these challenging questions.
How Will You Measure Your Life? is full of inspiration and wisdom, and will help students, midcareer professionals, and parents alike forge their own paths to fulfillment.

For undergraduate, MBA, and other courses in Business Logistics, Physical Distribution, Operations Management, Materials Management, and Supply Chain Management, in departments of business and engineering. This comprehensive discussion-covering the planning, organizing, and controlling of such activities as transportation, inventory maintenance, facility location, order processing, purchasing, warehousing, materials handling, packaging, customer service standards, and product scheduling-is specifically designed to help students solve actual challenges that they will encounter in today's marketplace. It provides the basic decision making tools and concepts used for finding cost reduction and strategic opportunities. Logware software on CD-ROM is included.

Based on groundbreaking research at MIT, Clockspeed introduces a revolutionary approach to business strategy, applying the principles of genetics to show how choices in supply-chain design can drive company and industry evolution. "Faster is not necessarily smarter. In this world of constant acceleration, while most firms become increasingly reactive, the race will go to the few who can think more deeply rather than react more quickly. Charlie Fine's is likely to be one of the voices they are listening to."-Peter Senge, founding Director of the MIT Organizational Learning Center and author of The Fifth Discipline Drawing from a decade of research at MIT, and using examples from the fastest-changing industries, Fine introduces a whole new vocabulary for analyzing and implementing business strategy, turning managers into "corporate geneticists" who do not react to the forces of change but master them to engineer their company's destiny.

National Bestseller
“No other book offers such an accessible and balanced tour of the many benefits and downsides of our continuing infatuation with data.”—Wall Street Journal
“What I’m certain about is that Big Data will be the defining text in the discussion for some time to come.”—Forbes.com It seems like “big data” is in the news every day, with new examples of how powerful algorithms are teasing out the hidden connections between seemingly unrelated things. Whether it is used by the NSA to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers’ buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and the very way we think. But it also poses new threats, from the end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.
Big Data is the first big book about this earthshaking subject, with two leading experts explaining what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards.

The role of large-scale business enterprise--big business and its managers--during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution. The managerial revolution, presented here with force and conviction, is the story of how the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith called the 'invisible hand' of market forces. Chandler shows that the fundamental shift toward managers running large enterprises exerted a far greater influence in determining size and concentration in American industry than other factors so often cited as critical: the quality of entrepreneurship, the availability of capital, or public policy.

"Scale and Scope" is Alfred Chandler's first major work since his Pulitzer prize-winning "The Visible Hand". Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the US, Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late 20th century's most important developments.

Why has median income stopped rising in the US?
Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly?
Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal?
A popular explanation right now is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation-- a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity.
In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. Recent advances are the stuff of science fiction: computers now drive cars in traffic, translate between human languages effectively, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players.
As these examples show, digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.
But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.
In Race Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because there's been technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren't keeping up.

“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”
- Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla
If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.
Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.
Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

The first business plan is often the most difficult to write. A company may have little or no history, and often may not know lender requirements, what to stress and what to avoid. Your First Business Plan simplifies the process by outlining the different parts of a business plan and, in an uncomplicated question-and-answer style, helps the business owner create a winning plan for their business. The easy-to-follow chapters show entrepreneurs how to: --Think through strategies and balance enthusiasm with facts--Capture and hold the interest of potential lenders and investors--Understand and develop their financial statements--Recognize the unique selling advantage of their products or services--Avoid potentially disastrous errors like undercapitalization and negative cash flow Also included in this book: --A glossary of planning and financial terms--A complete sample business plan

Engaging and direct, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is the guidebook for anyone who wants to write well.Engaging and direct, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is the guidebook for anyone who wants to write well.

This is the first strategy book on developing organization-wide, online learning. Learn what companies like AT&T, Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Merrill Lynch, Prudential, and U S West and others have accomplished with e-learning. It isn't just the promise of impressive technology that is driving people to e-learning. Businesses need to get rapidly changing information to large numbers of people faster than ever. They need to lower the overall costs of creating a workforce that performs faster and better than the competition, and they need to do this around the clock. It's no longer a question of whether organizations will one day implement online learning, but whether they will do it well.Most organizations that need to train their employees are experimenting with some form of Web-delivered learning. But most organizations have focused on the technological challenges, buying the right software, getting enough bandwidth allocated for Web-based training, designing courseware, etc. These are important first steps but the larger strategic issues remain unsolved: how to make e-learning part of the daily work culture, and fully implement its power. "E-Learning" is the first book in this exciting new field that addresses not just the technological challenges of Web-based training and knowledge management, but how to develop a comprehensive organization-wide learning strategy. Author Marc Rosenberg discusses the technological issues but more importantly, assesses the dramatic strategic, organizational, and political issues involved in the process of making e-learning a reality.Written for professionals responsible for leading the revolution in workplace learning, "E-Learning" takes a broad, strategic perspective on corporate learning. This wake-up call for executives everywhere discusses: requirements for building a viable e-learning strategy; how e-learning will change the nature of training organizations; knowledge management; and, other new forms of e-learning. "E-Learning" explains the basic principles of a comprehensive Web-based learning strategy - how to link your organization's Web sites, Web-based training, courseware, and all the other components of online learning.With an underlying focus on the "why" - and not just the "how" - Rosenberg provides a roadmap for growing and sustaining an e-learning culture that's based on twenty years of observations, best (and worst) practices, and conversations with leaders in the learning technology fields. Divided into three parts, "E-Learning" offers an essential balance between building great e-learning (design and technology issues) and implementing it (acceptance and support issues). Within each chapter, examples illustrate many key components of an effective e-learning framework. Unlike other technology-focused guides to Web-based training, "E-Learning" is the first book that tackles the overarching strategic issues - problems facing any organization experimenting with the tremendous promise of Web-based learning and knowledge management."The biggest growth in the Internet, and the area that will prove to be one of the biggest agents of change, will be in e-learning." - John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems. 'Marc Rosenberg is one of the key thinkers in the ever-changing world of learning and technology. This book offers a pragmatic and powerful set of resources for any organization walking the sometimes slippery e-learning pathway' - Elliott Masie, President, The MASIE Center. 'If there is any reason to fear e-learning, it's that we will fail to understand why we are doing it. This book combines the right amount of reflection on why with a heavy dose of sound advice about how to. It has a lot in common with it's subject. It's just what we need, just in time' - John W. Cone, Vice President, Dell Learning, Dell Computer Corporation.'Marc Rosenberg has nailed it. He surfaces the issues, realistically describes alternatives and operationalizes what a true e-learning strategy is. Good cases. Good ideas. Good writing. You need this book!' - Gloria Gery, Consultant in Performance Support and Learning. 'Dr. Rosenberg's vision, coupled with the useful advice peppered throughout his book, will guide corporate leaders of learning as we strive to harness the power of e-learning for the benefit of our people and our businesses. I intend to share the book widely with my business colleagues and professional associates' - Pat Kelly, Vice President, People Development, AT&T Wireless Services.

"If you design online learning, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction is a 'must read.' Unlike all the pontificating and conjecture that's been published about elearning, this important work details the evidence-based findings that provide practical guidelines for effective online instructional design. For me, this book is the 'bible' of our profession."—Peter Orton, Ph.D., IBM Center for Advanced Learning "The partnership between Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer in writing successive editions of e-Learning and the Science of Instruction has provided us with one of the most important collaborations in our discipline. Their ability to communicate complex concepts in clear, indeed sparkling prose is unrivalled. In e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, we have a book for everyone including students, professional instructional designers and researchers."—John Sweller, professor, School of Education, University of New South Wales "For the experienced instructional designer, having this supportive research provides the rationale needed to obtain consensus from a training development team." —David L. Bennett, senior training program developer, Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding "Graduate students, undergraduate students, or employees responsible for designing and developing educational software will benefit from e-Learning and the Science of Instruction. It opens your eyes to interesting ideas that you have never thought of when designing an e-course."—Thair Hamtini, chairman of the computer information systems department, The University of Jordan