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The lesser‐known world of corporate creativity had its beginning in 1942, and Alex Osborn (the “O” in the BBDO Advertising Agency) is credited as the founder. Today, driving forces in this world include the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C., the Creative Education Foundation in Buffalo, N.Y., and the European Association for Creativity and Innovation in the Netherlands. Major conferences include the International Conference on Creativity and Innovation, the annual Innovative Thinking Conference, and the Creative Problem Solving Institute. Prominent periodicals include The Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management, published in Manchester, England, and The Journal of Product Innovation Management, published by the PDMA. Pioneers such as Sid Parnes, George Prince, Edward de Bono, Robert Galvin, and Bob Johnston are known and respected within this world. And major universities offer programs and course work in the field: Teresa Amabile at the Harvard Business School is focusing her research on business environments that support high levels of creativity and innovation, and John Kao runs the Managing Innovation executive education program at Stanford University.

Service organisations do not always manage those items which affect customer satisfaction to the same level as manufacturing organisations, which indicates a possible mismatch between what customers think they are buying and what service organisations seem to be providing. Efficiency is certainly needed but too much emphasis on efficiency may be dysfunctional if it leads to over‐standardisation, or emphasis on the product at the expense of the process, when the customers think they are buying process elements. Effectiveness could be better achieved by emphasis on the processes rather than by trying to become more “product‐orientated”.

Corporate innovation efforts frequently suffer from a lack of strategic focus and alignment between innovation teams and senior executives. The identification of a corporate strategic frontier can align both groups on the scope and focus of their innovation efforts, greatly increasing the likelihood of a successful innovation initiative. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

The identification of potential strategic frontiers will emerge from the process of finding the company's strategic intent. The paper aims to carry out this process by first identifying the organization's “passionate core,” which is the defining nature of the company that provides its energy and drives its success.

The paper finds that in a creative process, a team considers what could take place at the intersection of the passionate core and the future changes. What new opportunities are suggested? How can the organization get to the future first? What changes are required?

The paper describes a process to help innovation team define when they are exploring in a strategically appropriate and fruitful area and when they have strayed beyond the pale. This defined area becomes the strategic frontier for the corporation, an area of potential growth that is within the strategic scope that senior executives have identified for the business.

The paper proposes that a company must idetify the most important changes that will likely take place in its future, based on trends in technology, demographics, globalization, and other environmental factors. The most intriguing of these opportunities will define a company's strategic frontiers, which become the focus of the innovation initiatives.

In 2009, the European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) celebrates its 15th anniversary and its precursor, the UK OMA, its 25th anniversary. The purpose of this paper is to review the origins and foundations of today's EurOMA and how it has progressed to being a vibrant and successful organisation.

The review draws on archived documents, especially newsletters and board minutes, as well as memories of all of those involved.

The review shows an important evolution from two groups of like minded individuals, through building annual conferences and brings these together as one. It then shows how it has evolved both through formalisation of its activities, building international links and, most importantly, developing a portfolio of activities to develop and support young researchers.

Where records are not available, the paper draws on individual memories of events from a long time ago.

As well as providing an invaluable record, it can provide a model for the development of similar organisations.

Based on a review of the literature, this paper sets out to suggest that an organisation's service recovery procedures lead to three distinct outcomes; customer, process, and employee recoveries. The objective of the paper is to investigate the impact of service recovery procedures (i.e. the way service recovery is managed and executed) on these three outcomes and their relative impact on an organisation's financial performance.

A model, linking recovery procedures to the outcomes of recovery and financial performance, is tested using empirical data from a detailed survey of 60 organisations in the UK.

It would appear that many organisations and academic researchers have focused their efforts on customer recovery and have, to some extent, ignored the potentially higher impact outcomes of process and employee recovery. The main finding was that service recovery procedures have a greater impact on employees and process improvement than on customers. Furthermore, while many organisations appear to be concerned with service recovery few seem to be good at it or gaining the benefits of recovered customers, improved processes or recovered employees.

This paper tries to encourage wider research into the impact of service recovery. The main limitations were sample size and selection.

It challenges the way some organisations have focused their recovery procedures on satisfying or delighting customers and suggests that by doing so they are missing out on substantial benefits. It also suggests that many organisations have a long way to go to develop their recovery procedures.

This work proposes three outcomes of service recovery and finds that the impact of process and employee recoveries may be more significant than customer recovery.

Outlines the legal position in which US firms can downsize. Comments that the current climate of laying off workers could lead to significant increases in claims if employers do not follow correct procedures. Consider issues such as wrongful termination, violence, age and disability discrimination. Looks at recent trends within this area of litigation and concludes that whilst job security for life is thing of the past, companies still have a responsibility to deal sensitively in this area.