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

Harvard Business Review

How can you continuously defer short term profitability to grow your network effect? As long as there are strong increasing returns to create , it’s possible that the net present value of my profit harvesting is indefinitely larger if deferred to the future. The Refresher: Net Present Value.

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How Marketers Can Avoid Big Data Blind Spots

Harvard Business Review

Overcoming “short-term-ism”. One major blind spot for marketers to be aware of is “short-term-ism” that most analytics engender. The reality is that the majority of marketing activities have both a short- and long-term impact on sales. One consumer food brand almost fell into this short-term trap.

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How to Quantify Sustainability’s Impact on Your Bottom Line

Harvard Business Review

But we recognize that, in many businesses, resources are often allocated according to short-term, bottom-line pressures. We found that sustainable and deforestation-free practices created significant financial benefits for all players in the industry’s value chain. of revenues) in expected net present value over 10 years.

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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).

CFO 8
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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. The risks-rewards are relatively low.

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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.

NPV 13
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What Xerox PARC Learned About Executing on Open Innovation

Harvard Business Review

As innovators engage with the market through the MVP, they learn valuable information to help them refine the product-market fit and better understand and further build for the value proposition. Net Present Value ). This iterative approach is consistent with "real options" (vs. There's a solution.