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Why Some Digital Companies Should Delay Profitability for as Long as They Can

Harvard Business Review

For years, AWS has invested in driving developer and company adoption of its platform by driving down prices and introducing low cost features to make developer’s lives easier. That ecosystem investment reinforces the value proposition and drives more developer adoption. The Refresher: Net Present Value.

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Match Your Innovation Process to the Results You Want

Harvard Business Review

It tends to be short-term, uses familiar (traditional) metrics and development systems like Stage Gate. When forced to present familiar metrics for truly out-of-the-box "beginning" ideas, work teams develop what our friend Jay Paap calls "Imaginary Numbers." So let's talk about incremental.

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How CMOs Can Get CFOs on Their Side

Harvard Business Review

To date, however, the reality of marketing analytics has fallen short of the promise. Just 36 percent of CMOs, for example, have quantitatively proven the short-term impact of marketing spend, according to the 2013 CMO Survey (and for demonstrating long-term impact, that figure drops to 32 percent).

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Will You Be Writing Off Your Investment in Egypt?

Harvard Business Review

In both places, we know the instability will worsen macroeconomic performance in the short term. If that is the case, and the faster growth generates higher profits for them over the long term, that might well compensate for any short-term losses from the disruption. Tunisia and Egypt are cases in point.

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What Xerox PARC Learned About Executing on Open Innovation

Harvard Business Review

Companies knew how to engage a design firm, license IP, and form joint ventures, but few knew how to truly co-develop innovations with external partners, such as PARC. Net Present Value ). It turns out that companies tend to do well when they focus on their short-term business or develop options for long-term growth.

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Stop Focusing on Profitability and Go for Growth

Harvard Business Review

Today, the average cost of equity capital sits at close to half that: just 8% for the roughly 1600 companies comprising the Value Line Index. So, in real terms, debt financing is essentially free. In these circumstances, strategies that generate faster growth create more value for most companies than those that improve profit margins.

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How to Choose the Ideas Your Company Should Invest In

Harvard Business Review

Note what isn't part of the decision: an idea's net present value or return on investment. Teams should certainly develop their best guesses about how the idea will make money, but leaders shouldn't place too much emphasis on financial metrics for early stage ideas.

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