IMD Annual Report 2019

38

IMD ANNUAL REPORT 2019

BILL IT, KILL IT, OR KEEP IT FREE? Stefan Michel, Wolfgang Ulaga MIT Sloan Management Review

Many business-to-business companies give away services for free. The list of free services is much longer than everyone thinks. For every service, you should either bill it - charge a price for it, kill it - get rid of it, if it doesn’t give you any advantage, or keep it for free - but then you have to make sure you actually get a competitive advantage out of it. What we provide in this article is first a rationale of why you have to pick one of the three options and, second, we provide you with a roadmap. Our research clearly shows that most customers are willing to pay for some of the services if they are presented as ‘value adding’.”

Stefan Michel IMD Professor of Marketing and Service Management

A few other articles published in top academic journals

TOWARD A TEMPORAL THEORY OF FAULTLINES AND SUBGROUP ENTRENCHMENT Alyson Meister, Sherry Thatcher, Jieun Park, Mark Maltarich Journal of Management Studies

RACIAL DIVERSITY AND ITS ASYMMETRY WITHIN AND ACROSS HIERARCHICAL LEVELS. THE EFFECTS ON FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE Stephen Smulowitz, Margarita Mayo, Manuel Becerra Human Relations TRANSCULTURAL BROKERAGE: THE ROLE OF COSMOPOLITANS IN BRIDGING STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL HOLES Karsten Jonsen*, Orly Levy, Maury Peiperl Journal of Management

*Karsten Jonsen sadly passed away in late 2018. He is warmly remembered and greatly missed.