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How Marketers Can Avoid Big Data Blind Spots

Harvard Business Review

If you were looking for a theme song that captures marketing today, you could do worse than pick Queen’s anthem “Under Pressure.” Marketing is under pressure to show results, cut costs, and drive growth. Marketers should welcome it. In our experience, marketing can increase marketing ROI (MROI) by 15 – 20 percent.

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Why We Need to Update Financial Reporting for the Digital Era

Harvard Business Review

The market caps of just four companies, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, now exceed $3 trillion. Their combined assets of $944 billion are an order of magnitude lower than the combined assets of $7,700 billion of the largest 3,177 companies in 1986, when the aggregate market capitalization reached $3 trillion for the first time.

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What Xerox PARC Learned About Executing on Open Innovation

Harvard Business Review

At that time it was hard for PARC to understand how much we needed to invest in a new technology before approaching partners to work together in commercialization. Potential open innovation partners can't always immediately envision later-stage business opportunities from early-stage technology seeds. You can invest iteratively.

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Why Is an App Worth as Much as a Small Oil Field?

Harvard Business Review

While on the surface, the dirty business of fossil fuels is nothing like Silicon Valley, many in the oil business have moved beyond the standard net present value (NPV) model for assessing the merit of investments. Consider the rapid progress Facebook has made on mobile, not only domestically, but in emerging markets.

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Shape Strategy With Simple Rules, Not Complex Frameworks

Harvard Business Review

Employees frequently attribute breakdowns to incompetence or bad faith on the part of colleagues in other departments: "Those bozos in headquarters [or finance or marketing] screw everything up." Strategies often falter in execution because of insufficient coordination across the organization.

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What If Investors Who Held Their Shares Longer Got More Voting Power?

Harvard Business Review

But I long for actions that go beyond admonitions to managers and boards to do better, that give both parties a better chance to stand up to capital markets players, like activist hedge funds, pressuring them to become too short-term focused. The Refresher: Net Present Value. Related Video.

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How to Choose the Ideas Your Company Should Invest In

Harvard Business Review

Can we get to the market without any technological miracles? Note what isn't part of the decision: an idea's net present value or return on investment. Consider some combination of the following criteria: Does what we hope to do fit our strategy? (If If you don't have an innovation strategy , go and create one.).

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