Service blueprinting is a process that businesses use for analyzing and improving service. Originally presented in the Harvard Business Review in 1984, it has retained a strong following ever since. At present, it is experiencing a revival at numerous academic institutions. The authors of this article present the process of service blueprinting.…

Writing in 1995 for the "Harvard Business Review" audience of executive managers, Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen coined the term "disruptive technologies" to describe innovations that improve a product, service, or operation in ways wholly unanticipated by leaders of existing markets. Christensen's economic theory offers a launch…

Baker Library at Harvard Business School is increasingly asked by the school's faculty to create custom digital information products to enhance course assignments and to find novel ways of electronically disseminating faculty research. In order to prioritize these requests, as well as facilitate, manage, and track the resulting projects, the…

There are many factors that go into high educational and occupational achievement, including hard work, motivation, and luck. But how important is talent? Specifically, how likely were global innovators and leaders intellectually talented or gifted when younger? This paper reviews retrospective data on multiple US samples (Total N = 11,745),…

The report of the third year of Harvard's Program on Technology and Society contains summaries of research done on the relationship of technology to education, biomedical science, business, and social and political change in general. The research group on education, concentrating on secondary education, concluded that high schools in ten years are…

Creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, and control. Organizations must make a concerted effort to get rid of creativity killers and be truly innovative so that creativity not only survives but thrives. (Author/JOW)

Managers who foster innovation succeed in getting different approaches to grate against one another in a productive process called creative abrasion. They nurture and know how to use a cognitively diverse environment. (JOW)

Top-down processes for institutionalizing ideas can stifle creativity. Xerox researchers learned how to combine process-based and practice-based methods in order to disseminate best practices from a community of repair technicians. (JOW)