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• Working Paper | 2019

  Managed Ecosystems and Translucent Institutional Logics: Engaging Communities

  Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman

  Citation:

  Altman, Elizabeth J., Frank Nagle, and Michael Tushman. "Managed Ecosystems and Translucent Institutional Logics: Engaging Communities." Working Paper, February 2019.  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Business Review (website) | January 4, 2019

  How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals

  Marya L. Besharov, Wendy K. Smith and Michael Tushman

  It’s notoriously difficult for a business to manage two separate-but-equal goals—making money and creating social value at the same time, for example, or managing an existing business at the same time that you invent a new one. Most attempts at managing these ”strategic paradoxes” fail because they’re not managed carefully and consistently. (It’s easy to write a great purpose statement or to dream up a new business model but way more difficult to follow through when it’s time to make actual tradeoffs between the goals.) Three organizational mechanisms can help: guardrails that protect the weaker of the two goals, dynamic decision-making that treats high-level goals as sacrosanct but tactical decisions as provisional, and leaders dedicated to “both/and” thinking.

  Keywords: Goals and Objectives; Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Profit; Decision Making;

  Citation:

  Besharov, Marya L., Wendy K. Smith, and Michael Tushman. "How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals." Harvard Business Review (website) (January 4, 2019).  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2018 (Revised December 2018)

  SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command

  Herman Leonard, Mitchell Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman

  James “Hondo” Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The questions had a common theme: how would Geurts’s experience running an innovative procurement effort for U.S. Special Forces units enable him to change a much larger—and much more rigid—organization like the U.S. Navy? In one of the most secretive parts of the U.S. military, Geurts founded an open platform called SOFWERX to speed the rate of ideas to Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, and the like. His team even sourced the idea for a hoverboard from a YouTube video. But how should things like SOFWERX and protypes like the EZ-Fly find a place within the Navy writ large?

  Keywords: James Geurts; innovation; public entrepreneurship; open innovation; crowdsourcing; contests; prototyping; SOFWERX; Special Operations; SOCOM; govtech; procurement; FAR; EZ-Fly; Navy; Department of Defense; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Acquisition; Public Administration Industry; United States;

  Citation:

  Leonard, Herman, Mitchell Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik, and Kerry Herman. "SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command." Harvard Business School Case 819-004, July 2018. (Revised December 2018.)  View Details

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