30 October 2025
Authors: Cristiano Busco, Tony Wain, Fred Nanni
Abstract:
Does management control kill creativity? How big is the challenge to manage efficiency within innovation and innovating processes? Do control and creativity call for a balance within processes of innovation – or is balancing bad? And how difficult is execute, measure and report sustainable strategies? The answer to these questions is probably one that is bedeviling entrepreneurs and executives everywhere around the world. While a controlled working environment has its advantages, it may hamper creativity, as well as the ability to innovate that leads to new products and to growth and profitability. In this Case we address these issues by offering insights from Monnalisa, a medium-sized enterprise in the fashion industry that has drawn upon formal and informal control tools to manage its concurrent and ongoing need for creative design and efficient production processes. In doing so a number of formal (such as collection briefing, provisional budget, contribution margin by collection; cost cards; balanced scorecard and strategy map; intellectual capital; annual integrated report) and informal (the role of the founder, inter-functional workgroups and focus groups, the photo story exercise) mechanisms of control are explored and discussed in the context of the case. Within this context, we also explore the attempt of Monnalisa to achieve its business objectives by executing, monitoring and reporting sustainable strategies. This case is particularly interesting because it combines the discussion on the adoption of traditional techniques with the implementation of recently developed management tools.
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