Harvard Business Review, and its online extension, HBR.org, is the most prestigious U.S. business publication, and the most difficult in which to place articles. The average acceptance rate for unsolicited articles is under 0.1% for print, and the rate for online is less than 1%. The Bloom Group has helped write and place many HBR articles, both in print and online, with a high rate of success. Here are some examples:

The Perils of Underpricing New Products

Simon-Kucher Partners is a $200 million+ management consulting firm specializing in marketing, sales and pricing strategies. In 2015, the Bonn, Germany-based firm asked us to turn its expertise and client experiences on product innovation into a book. After finding an agent (who secured a publisher, John Wiley Sons Inc.) and helping the authors, Madhavan Ramanujam (an SKP partner) and Georg Tacke (co-CEO), capture their ideas in a manuscript, Bloom Group then worked with SKP in 2016 to market the book (Monetizing Innovation. How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price) through two Harvard Business Review articles. This, the second HBR article (“Your New Hit Product Might Be Underpriced”), ran in the publication’s May 24, 2016 online edition. You can read that article here .

Innovation Lessons from Porsche and Fiat Chrysler

This was the first of two Harvard Business Review articles that Bloom Group helped Simon-Kucher Partners’ Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke prepare and secure to help publicize their book Monetizing Innovation. Simon-Kucher is a $200 million+ management consulting firm that is widely considered to be the world’s leading consulting firm in pricing strategy.

In this article (titled “In Product Development, Let Your Customers Define Perfection”), the authors compare new-car launches from Porsche (the Cayenne SUV in the early 2000s) and Fiat Chrysler’s Dodge Dart about 10 years later. The Cayenne became a huge hit that propelled Porsche, and the Dart became a poor sales performer that soon will be discontinued. The article ran in the May 9, 2016 online edition of HBR. You can read it here.

How Digital Companies Never Stop Innovating

The ability to make thousands of changes a day to its online retail service has been a key to Amazon’s success. Indeed, that kind of agility has become the fundamental operating model for internet business. It won’t be easy for non-digital natives to acquire that capability, but it can be done. We helped process innovation consultant Brad Power place his article explaining how on HBR.org in May 2016, here.

IBM’s AI Strategy

IBM successfully transformed itself from a hardware company to a software services company 20 years ago. Today, it is attempting another transformation, this time betting on artificial intelligence (Watson) and cloud computing. The last transformation was hard; this one will be harder, according to Synapse Partners founder and managing director Evangelos Simoudis, and management consultant Brad Power, who interviewed IBM executives and customers.

Reducing Risk in Emerging Markets: A Study

The Bloom Group helped FTI Consulting, an international business advisory firm, design and conduct a quantitative and qualitative survey of global business leaders to discover how leading companies successfully mitigate the many risks of doing business in emerging markets, and where lagging companies go wrong.

We then helped FTI Consulting’s senior leaders publish the survey’s findings, here. and place an article about the lessons learned from the survey in HBR.org, here. in September 2015.

Tearing Down the Business School Ivory Tower

In the opinion of two business school professors – James Wetherbe, of Texas Tech University, and Jon Eckhardt, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, most business school research is too academic, and not relevant to the needs of companies. They think that’s a serious problem, and explain how schools can change their degree programs, faculty incentives, and their fundamental approach to research to make the education they offer more useful to both students and their eventual employers. The Bloom Group helped Wetherbe and Eckhardt place their article on HBR.org, here. in December 2014.

The Challenges That Confront Midsized Businesses: A Series

The leaders of midsized businesses often come up dry when they search for advice on how to accelerate growth, improve processes, or deal with the challenges that impair or threaten performance. Most of the literature on these topics is focused on Fortune 500 businesses because they can afford the big fees big consultancies charge. But the problems of midsized companies are very different than those of large (or small) ones.

Robert Sher is founding principal of CEO to CEO. a consulting firm of CEOs who advise midsize companies. We helped Sher write and publish Mighty Midsized Companies. a book on the unique challenges that midsized businesses confront, and how they can meet and overcome them. It was published in May 2015. Based on his book, we helped Sher place a series of seven columns in HBR.org focused on midsized companies, beginning March 2014 with “Midsize Companies Must Prioritize Ruthlessly,” here. and concluding with “Where There’s No Margin for Toxic Leadership,” June 2014, here. Sher’s seven HBR.org articles have received close to 650 comments, testifying to the hunger for midsized businesses advice.

Winning at Big Data

Everyone loves Big Data, but some companies retrieve a far greater return on their Big Data investments than others. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) surveyed 1,217 executives from companies with over $1 billion in annual revenue, across a dozen industries in all over the world, to learn what separated the leaders from the laggards. We helped Satya Ramaswamy, vice president and global head of TCS’ Digital Enterprise group place his article on the Big Data divide on HBR.org in June 2013, here .

The Next Revolution in Productivity

This article, written by consultants Ric Merrifield (Microsoft), Jack Calhoun (Accelare) and Dennis Stevens (Synaptus), was published in June 2008. Titled the “The Next Revolution in Productivity,” it describes how companies can reach beyond business process improvement to a new frontier of efficiency using an approach called a business capabilities analysis.

The Bloom Group helped the authors craft the article proposal, capture a case study, and ghostwrite the manuscript.

Give a Little, Get a Little

Published in the September 2005 issue, this article was by two Texas Tech University business professors, Eric Walden and James Wetherbe. They came to Bloom Group late in 2004 with the idea of a short article for HBR. It was about the intellectual property that companies often put at risk when they outsource business processes and information systems.

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