Research: Faculty and Research Associates

CRTI has conducted sponsored research programs for prominent organizations including Microsoft, Cisco Systems, NCR Teradata and the U.S. Navy. Topics ranged from CIO leading practices at Global 2000 companies to military and network technology management. These programs include initiatives led by the following faculty:

Mohan Sawhney | James Conley | Mark Jeffery | Michael Lippitz | Robert C. Wolcott

	Mohan Sawhney directs the Center’s bi-monthly Faculty and Staff meeting  Photo © Nathan Mandell

Mohan Sawhney

McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology Mohanbir Sawhney conducts research in the areas of network-centric innovation, innovation typology, marketing frameworks, marketing in new media environments and branding and social identity.  His work on innovation typology has been published in publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Financial Times. His work on the Innovation Radar, co-authored with Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz, has been widely cited and used by corporations worldwide. He has also written extensively on community-centric innovation and innovation in networked environments in publications like California Management Review and Journal of Direct Marketing. His work on network-centric innovation was the subject of his fourth book – The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World, published in November 2007.  He is currently developing models for a marketing process architecture as well as a framework for organizing and measuring the performance of marketing in large corporations called the Three Horizons of Marketing.

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	James Conley, clinical professor of technology, offers feedback to a post-doctorate research fellow.  Photo © Nathan Mandell

James Conley

James Conley and his post-doctoral students are examining how intangible assets in general and intellectual properties in particular are changing the nature of competition for firms in both developed and developing economies.   This research examines public domain IP databases in a novel and rigorous manner and has implications for strategy, marketing and technology professionals.   The outlets for this research include journals, management reviews and more mainstream media such as the Wall Street Journal.  Additionally, he is leading workshops for academics and diffusing CRTI research findings through custom executive programs.  In June of 2008, he was called to serve on the United States Department of Commerce Advisory Committee to bring research insights to discussions of innovation public policy.

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Mark Jeffery

Director of Technology initiatives and Senior Lecturer in the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation, Mark Jeffery has an active research program at Kellogg. His primary focus is on unlocking strategic value from enterprise technology.

His first research project at Kellogg, “IT Portfolio Management Challenges and Best Practices,” surveyed Fortune 1000 CIOs. The idea behind information technology portfolio management is to manage IT assets as a portfolio, similar to stocks or mutual funds, and balance risk and return in investment decisions. For the study, 179 IT leaders responded and in total the research captured more than $30 billion of annual IT spending. This research demonstrated a maturity model for how organizations invest in IT, and showed that organizations at the highest level of maturity have higher return on assets. Jeffery also demonstrated that key component of successful organizations at the highest level of maturity is that they “keep score” by measuring the return of IT investments and creating a learning organization; feeding back actual performance for improved decision making.

He extended this research to the U.S. federal government. The research surveyed 44 federal government agencies including all 25 cabinet level agencies, in total capturing $44 billion of the $61 billion annual 2004 federal government budget. The research was particularly timely since the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 mandated that federal government agencies use IT portfolio management and demonstrate a return on investment for all IT projects over $10 million. In 2004 the federal government Office of Management and Budget began withholding IT budgets from agencies that were not in compliance with Clinger-Cohen. The research investigated compliance with Clinger-Cohen and the role of politics in IT funding decisions within the federal government. Jeffery also demonstrated a new maturity model for federal government IT portfolio management and compared and contrasted his team’s research (i.e. empirical data) against the Government Accounting Office model (i.e. the theoretical accounts of what officials believe should be happening).

A thread that runs throughout the research is the importance of risk in managing enterprise technology projects. To this end Jeffery has developed advanced real options tools to analyze risk in projects. The idea is conceptually simple: embed options, or flexibility, into projects to actively manage specific risks. However, adding options often comes at a price, so that the research enables managers to definitively answer the question, ‘Do you have too much flexibility in enterprise technology projects, or not enough?’

More recently, the empirical research has been extended to marketing. Jeffery has studied 250 large organizations on marketing management best practices. The sample captures $53 billion in marketing spend. This research has shown the essential capabilities that successful marketing organizations need to optimize their marketing performance, and has insights on the role of technology. The findings show, for example, that high-performing organizations invest more on branding, customer equity and infrastructure (enterprise technology) to support marketing. These organizations have higher sales growth, brand equity and shareholder equity.

This research highlights the importance of return on investment and understanding the value of investments. Jeffery leveraged this work in “Return on Investment Analysis,” a chapter he wrote for the 2004 Wiley Internet Encyclopedia, and the forthcoming 2009 Wiley Handbook of Technology Management. He has also developed 22 original case studies, which are published through Harvard Case Publishing and which span the spectrum of enterprise technology management issues from portfolio management, ROI, program project management, to real options and risk management.

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Michael Lippitz, Senior Research Associate and co-author, is heavily involved with the Kellogg Innovation Network and other Center initiatives.  Photo © Nathan Mandell

Research Fellow Michael Lippitz characterizes and assesses strategies, policies and management systems in the domains of science, technology and innovation, in both the private and public sectors.  He focuses on translating across these domains for high-level decision makers interested in enhancing corporate competitiveness or government effectiveness. 

His recent research projects include the following:

Building new businesses within large, established organizations
With Kellogg colleague Robert C. Wolcott, Lippitz published an article in MIT Sloan Management Review titled, “The Four Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship.”  The article provides guidance to companies seeking to expand their organic growth efforts to include new business development.  It highlights the cardinal choices top managers must make in designing and starting a corporate entrepreneurship effort.  Wolcott and Lippitz are preparing a book on corporate entrepreneurship, to be published by McGraw-Hill in 2009.

A review of contemporary innovation management
With Robert C. Wolcott, Lippitz wrote the chapter “Innovation Management in Large Corporations” for inclusion in the Handbook of Technology Management (forthcoming by John Wiley and Sons, 2009).  The chapter covers phase-gate processes, concept development, business system design, corporate entrepreneurship, open innovation and leadership and staffing for innovation.

U.S. export controls and the defense technology base
With colleague Richard Van Atta at the Institute for Defense Analyses, Lippitz wrote a report on technology export controls for the U.S. Department of Defense.  The report analyzes data in four industries to determine the economic impact of export controls.  It could not find compelling evidence that export controls have hurt U.S. industry to date.  However, the research explained how the current U.S. export control system is fundamentally out of synch with today’s world of global manufacturing, technology development and capital flows.

Making defense science and technology institutions responsive to urgent needs
Lippitz wrote a review of acquisition practices in the U.S. Department of Defense, to provide context for an analysis of the responsiveness of defense science and technology providers to unexpected and urgent needs that have arisen in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   The report suggested new mechanisms for improving the processes through better feedback from the field, greater reliance on small companies, and adoption of contemporary best practices aimed at finding, validating and prototyping externally derived solutions.

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Robert C. Wolcott, director of the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN), discusses plans for the KIN Global Summit, scheduled for summer 2009.  Photo © Nathan Mandell

Robert C. Wolcott

Robert C. Wolcott’s research interests focus on how large companies can innovate successfully to accomplish corporate objectives and how innovation can help local and global organizations achieve a range of commercial and social objectives.

With CRTI senior research associate Dr. Michael Lippitz, Wolcott has focused particular attention on corporate entrepreneurship, how established companies build new businesses.  The outcome of this work has been a popular MIT Sloan Management Review article (Fall 2007 edition), a range of teaching cases and a book under contract with McGraw-Hill scheduled for 2009 publication.

Wolcott also pioneered, with CRTI director Mohan Sawhney and CRTI alumnus Inigo Arroniz, the Innovation Radar.  Since its publication in the MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring 2006), the Radar has been gaining wide recognition as a powerful framework for rigorously measuring a company’s level of innovation along 12 dimensions, as well as for visualizing comprehensive new business design.  Wolcott has created a research partnership with the Nordic Council of Ministers to disseminate the Radar methodology throughout the Scandinavian countries.

In 2008, Wolcott joined Kellogg Marketing Professor Philip Kotler to investigate the relationship between the Marketing and R&D or product development functions at large companies.  The research has engaged professionals from more than 30 companies and will result in a set of principles for optimizing this critical partnership for innovation success.

More recently, Wolcott has turned his interest in innovation to helping develop solutions to the global challenges of the 21st century, such as economic development, environmental sustainability and security.  With Jason Fairbourne and P. Clint Rogers of Brigham Young University, he has a working paper in progress pioneering the field of “microfranchising,” a new business building methodology similar to microlending.

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