Experimentation Based Management

Ingersoll-Rand is a giant company that makes dreary products such as industrial grinders, used in auto-shops to sand down auto bodies. Historically, Ingersoll-Rand has been slow a bringing new products to market, with an average four-year product introduction cycle. The company decided to to something about the slow development cycle. It created a project team whose goal was to produce a new grinder in a year - one quarter the usual time. This team did a lot of things right in this direction, including the use of stories to emphasize the group's new attitude and culture. One story, for instance, involved a critical decision about whether to build the new grinder's casing out of plastic or metal. Plastic would be more comfortable for the customer, but would it hold up as well as metal? The traditional Ingersoll-Rand method of solving this problem would have been to conducted protracted, careful studies of the tensile and compression properties of both materials. But this was the...

From the "Business Model Design and Innovation" blog. Best Management Book 2009: "Business Model Innovation" by Osterwalder & Pigneur, Produced by ULURU by: Alexander Osterwalder The title of this blogpost is probably a bit cocky and it would certainly be completely off the mark if it were just about another management book... What will be different about this book that Professor Yves Pigneur and I are writing in collaboration with ULURU is the business model. We are launching this book based on an innovative business model, which is quite different from any other management book published to date. However, before revealing any ideas that we have come up with during our brainstorming sessions, I would like to get some inputs from you. Please help us design a great book by telling us what you would expect from a book by us on the topic of business model innovation. What will make you buy it? Take this survey to tell us what you would like to see in this book A...