Our Approach
MIT CISR researchers focus on year-long projects to help executives meet the challenge of leading dynamic, global, and information-intensive organizations. The relevance of our research is ensured by the active participation of corporate sponsors and patrons from a range of industries. Research results are disseminated through working papers, research briefings, an annual conference, and sponsor forums.
MIT CISR 2021 Research Projects
Accelerating Decision Making Without Breaking the Business
MIT CISR research has shown that companies are able to make better and faster decisions by devolving decision making to teams that are closer to customers or end users. Company leaders need to guide these decisions by setting four decision rights guardrails that serve as enabling constraints that align teams with enterprise-wide interests. We will be closely examining these guardrails with an emphasis on best practices.
Becoming a Serial Innovator of Digital Offerings
To defend, increase, and diversify how they make money, traditional companies have to engage in multiple fast-paced experiments in digital offerings: revenue-generating solutions that leverage digital technologies to address customer needs. Yet most struggle to do so. Continuing from 2020, in 2021 we will collect new data to expand the range of sectors and companies This project will expand on earlier research to new sectors and companies.
Creating Competitive Advantage Using Digital Data Assets
Digital Strategic Initiatives are specific projects that rely on a core of digital resources, and they are executed to achieve competitive advantage. A key DSI digital resource is the digital data asset—data that is modularized, governed, and shared in a highly scalable manner. We will explore how companies identify, design, deploy, and exploit digital data assets and what con-tributes to their competitive impact.
Doing Organizational Surgery with Fewer Complications
In MIT CISR research on becoming future ready, “organizational surgery” was one of four types of significant organizational change we identified. Also known as restructuring, organizational surgery is most effective when it improves both the customer experience and operational efficiency in a company not designed for the digital era. Organizational surgery is disruptive and often requires more than one intervention.
Domains 2.0
Customer needs center on addressing a specific problem or opportunity—what we call customer domains. The mismatch between a company’s industry-based mindset and the customer domain-based need often results in fragmented customer experience. In this project we will research how enterprises are transforming themselves to deliver on customer domain expectations.
How Can You Make Your Workforce Future Ready?
We found that large organizations must simultaneously pursue digital fitness and digitization of work in order to build future-ready workforce. Firms in our research with a future-ready workforce outperformed their competitors on both revenue growth and gross margin. In 2021 we will draw on new case studies to get a better understanding of what it takes to build a workforce that is equipped and empowered to solve complex problems in a digital business environment.
Maximizing Value Capture from Digital Business Ecosystems
Our research on how firms create value from digital business and how much value they capture via greater firm performance revealed that firms create and capture value from customers, ecosystems, and operations. Under-standing how to capture value from ecosystems is increasingly important for firms. In 2021, we will study how firms capture the most value from their digital business ecosystems.
Successfully Scaling AI Solutions
For most companies, AI investments are on the rise while returns remain flat. Our research has identified that a root cause of lagging success is the need for new managerial practices that help AI solutions scale and thrive over time. This research will explore how companies can maximize value from AI with a focus on key practices that enable trusted, safe AI deployment and diffusion.