article thumbnail

Breaking the Death Grip of Legacy Technologies

Harvard Business Review

Technologies like 3-D printing, robotics, advanced motion controls, and new methods for continuous manufacturing hold great potential for improving how companies design and build products to better serve customers. Why are older incumbent firms slow to adopt new technologies even when the economic or strategic benefits are clear?

article thumbnail

Innovating the Toyota, and YouTube, Way

Harvard Business Review

In terms of people, processes and technologies, Toyota and Google's YouTube have little in common. The more deeply Jim's essays discussed the nature of supplier relationships, work-flow and value creation in lean enterprise, the keener the connection with YouTube's Space. They don't just partner; they provide resources that add value.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Why Can’t U.S. Health Care Costs Be Cut in Half?

Harvard Business Review

Technological improvements in health care have given us the quality of life we enjoy today. Ford shifted the auto industry from craft to mass production, and the Japanese later took it a step further to lean production. The same can be said of other procedures that might lend themselves to mass or lean production.

article thumbnail

Strategy’s No Good Unless You End Up Somewhere New

Harvard Business Review

The smart phone industry has gone through several disruptive changes in just a decade, whereas the steel industry’s technology shifts took place over a hundred-year period. We tend to think of a shiny new product offering when we picture “strategic innovation,” but that’s too limited.

article thumbnail

B-Schools Aren’t Bothering to Produce HR Experts

Harvard Business Review

In the 1980s, our organizations learned a great deal about how to improve productivity, quality, and costs from Japanese practices. If they were, employers might hire them instead of leaning on their data scientists for insights and context they aren’t equipped to deliver. A few decades ago, U.S. Let me explain.

article thumbnail

Can Lean Manufacturing Put an End to Sweatshops?

Harvard Business Review

The technologies and processes that are transforming companies. The initiative sought to improve manufacturing operations — to deliver high-quality products in relatively small batches and on shorter production deadlines. Insight Center. Operations in a Connected World. Sponsored by Accenture.

article thumbnail

How Economists Got Income Inequality Wrong

Harvard Business Review

In the 1990s, a whole subfield of economics reached "virtually unanimous agreement," as a survey in the Journal of Economic Perspectives noted , that in the context of technological change, markets themselves inevitably drove U.S. income inequality.