The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property

The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property Review

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The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property Feature

How to turn intellectual property into an indispensable source of competitive advantage

Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt have consulted for companies that are highly efficient, full of hard workers and smart managers—yet barely able to eke out a profit. They’ve also worked in undisciplined, mismanaged companies that generate huge margins year after year. The key to sustainable profits, they realized, was intellectual property. Yet most managers are unable to see the power of IP because they were trained to focus on more tangible factors.

This book is about turning invisible assets into an unbeatable edge. With the right IP and the right strategies, companies can command premium prices, increase market share, sustain lower costs, and even generate income directly. Without it, their products are undifferentiated and they can compete only on price.

The authors teach readers a new way to see their invisible assets, analyze them, and build a business around them. Unlike other books that focus on the legal and technical issues of IP, this one is totally practical.

Blaxill and Eckardt include fascinating case studies, ranging from golf balls (did Titleist steal technology from Bridgestone?) to Facebook (can it sustain its lead against new social networks?). They also look at a dozen mainstream companies in a wide range of industries, such as Toyota, Procter & Gamble, and IBM.

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The Optimization Edge: Reinventing Decision Making to Maximize All Your Company's Assets

The Optimization Edge: Reinventing Decision Making to Maximize All Your Company's Assets Review

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The Optimization Edge: Reinventing Decision Making to Maximize All Your Company's Assets Feature

Steve Sashihara's latest book offers a groundbreaking approach to decision making. Using the newest advances in mathematics and computer software, companies can fully maximize their assets at every decision point. The Optimization Edge quickly introduces readers to this strategy in clear, nontechnical terms, with examples from the trenches.

Based on Steve's extensive experience working with major corporations across the industrial landscape, the book analyzes a variety of companies that are working on the frontier of Optimization. These multi-national organizations employ Optimization to make time-sensitive, complex decisions that drive up market share and profitability.

"For executives who don't have an optimization strategy, this book is a must read," says Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. "There's a good chance that the competition already has an active optimization battle plan--and the bottom-line savings to prove it."

The Optimization Edge provides real-life examples of Optimization, drawn from some of the most successful corporations--and optimizers--in the world. Top executives share their insights into the tremendous production and profit benefits of Optimization, while telling readers how to avoid pitfalls along the way. 

The book is written for a nontechnical business audience interested in moving from cut-back management to value creation and from decision making "by ear" to data-driven strategies that combine high-end algorithms with human judgment.

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