To advance the research frontier and diffuse management ideas we use a network model, based on collaborations with leading scholars from the most respected global business schools. Research is an open system; only through ideas exchange and joint work, thought leaders can produce breakthrough theories and have an impact on management practices.
Our research will be published on international scientific magazines and used to support teaching practices of our business school partners; or will be used internally for our executive education classes.
Currently, we have three main research areas in progress, some of them in collaboration with HBS faculty partners.
Breakthrough Strategic Insight
In 2001, Peter Drucker wrote in The Economist that businesspeople stand on the threshold of the knowledge society. In this society, a company’s competitive advantage will come from an historically underdeveloped asset: the ability to capture and apply strategic insights. > MORE
It’s a compelling argument. But our research at ECSI suggests that very few CEOs have actually bought into it. According to a CEO survey we recently did, creating the ability to generate strategic insight (which we defined as a perception that could trigger the creation of a distinctive and winning value proposition), was not considered to be a top ten priority for most CEOs. So strategic insight, simply doesn’t get a look in. But why do business leaders in a knowledge economy, with shrinking average margins in many market categories and weak macroeconomic scenarios, care so little about it? You would have thought it would top the to-do list of capabilities to nurture because is so critical to profitable growth.
ECSI has launched an internal research area aimed to address the following questions:
- Why CEOs don’t see insight generation as top priority capability to nourish?
- How to build wide-spread insight generation skills in a business?
- How to design insight driven strategy and innovation processes?
- How to identify among many strategic insights what are the ones with the potential to be a breakthrough?
This research area will deliver proprietary teaching material to support one of our most important executive courses and a number of blogs and articles for Harvard Business Review.
Predictable Growth
Mechanisms of action of disruptive growth can be studied and classified according to different models. In Western markets more and more businesses operate in a Competition H2 (herd + hell) regime, with unconscious and uniform behaviors which create commoditization. It is possible to break this self-destroying regime and search for predictable growt strategies able to shift or unfreeze large basins of demand and non-demand.
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ECSI has launched an internal research area aimed to address the following questions:
- How the competitive evolution cycle is related – or not – to the generation of structural mismatches between supply and demand (and non-demand) needs?
- How, eventually, those structural mismatches can be classified and correlated to different mechanisms of actions for a theory of predictable growth?
- What are the internal practices which inhibit companies in their ability to leverage non-demand as growth opportunity?
- Is it possible to segment non-demand by the type of barrier which prevents non-customers to buy? And as consequence, is it feasible to identify an actionable framework and set of tools to un-block non-customers?
This research area will deliver a number of Harvard Business School cases which will represebt the bases to develop a broader theory and framework of profitable growth in mature markets.
On profitable growth, in addition to internal research activities, Alessandro Di Fiore – Founder and CEO of ECSI – collaborates since 2003 with Professors Chan Kim and Renče Mauborgne of INSEAD in the application and development of Blue Ocean Strategy concepts and tools. Alessandro Di Fiore is Senior Member of the Global Blue Ocean Strategy Network founded by Kim and Mauborgne.
Innovation Management
Not only poorly run businesses, but also well managed companies using modern management practices can – unconsciously – generate an environment which refrains from innovation. Those internal invisible enemies play against the best intents. How to identify and defeat them? > MORE
This research area will be performed internally and will aim to address the following questions:
- To what extent current competitive analysis practices limit our strategic innovation capabilities?
- Do resource allocation processes act as innovation killers? If yes, how could the resource allocation processes of the future look like ?
- How does the innovation capability trap works? Why human beings tend to do more of the same at higher speed to close performance gaps, instead of rethinking their ways of working?
- How to systematize a tool kit to help companies analyze internal enemies of innovation?
Then, a second focused area of research on Innovation Management is in collaboration with Gary Pisano, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. This sub-area will focus on innovation during turn-around times and what business leaders should do (or not do). It will be based on jointly researched and published HBS cases.
