All articles by Tim Laseter

Business model innovation is overrated. Customizing conventional services online offers the surer path.

Once used largely for nonessential, tactical activities, partnering now covers core operations, transforming entire industries.

Purchasing can deliver ongoing benefits, but only if it cycles through a series of linked disciplines.

Marketers worry about top-line revenue, while operations people fret about cost. Differentiated Service Policies allow them to coexist.

Business-to-business e-commerce is fraught with peril for buyers and sellers alike. An exclusive survey of 1,800 e-Marketplaces shows what it takes to win.

"Common-goods" e-tailers are collapsing because they ignored an iron law of retailing: New formats win only by offering better prices, not better service.

E-tail intermediaries may do what Kozmo and Webvan could not.

Online's biggest retailer aims to serve the offline retailers it once threatened. The shift may be Amazon's best hope for prosperity.

Internet auctions create losers as well as winners. Game theory shows companies how to improve their chances.

Once considered the domain of tacticians, operations now resides at the forefront of business strategy. Consider the saga of Web-based delivery services.

Is Urbanfetch's demise a harbinger of doom for other Web-based delivery services? Maybe not, depending on their willingness to change and investors' willingness to wait.

Investors have risked billions on Webvan, Urbanfetch, and other same-day transporters. The economics, though, show they won't deliver for long.

The inefficient, tradition-bound, $4 billion trade-book industry is using the Internet to unlock an additional $2 billion-plus.

At the heart of best practice in purchasing is a set of skills. One of the most important is the one that enables managers to understand what determines cost.

This third article in a series on balanced purchasing focuses on target costing and recommends a five-step process to optimize the cost of product designs still in development. A hypothetical development effort for a sports watch is used to demonstrate the process. If carried out properly and at the right level of detail, target costing can insure competitiveness without jeopardizing supplier cooperation.

Size comes in three flavors — scale, scope, and network. Choose wisely from the menu.

Answer: When companies take to heart its three underlying principles.