The online version of the February 2007 Harvard Business Review contains the "HBR List". Which is described as their "Breakthrough Ideas for 2007". Upon reviewing the material I would have to concur. The authors alone are worth the price (apparently free).
Several of the Breakthrough Ideas that I am interested in include:
Algorithms in the Attic
The article starts off with its summary concept:
"For a powerful perspective on future business, take a hard look at mathematics past. As computing gets ever faster and cheaper, yesterday’s abstruse equations are becoming platforms for tomorrow’s breakthroughs. Companies in several industries are now dusting off these formulas and putting them in the service of new products and processes."
In
Partnership Accounting I noted the complexity of the algorithm used to calculate the operations in oil and gas could be modeled in the current programming languages and particularly Java. This Harvard article is similar in terms of what the processing power and algorithms of past advanced maths could be used to form new business models and opportunities.
The Leader from Hope;"Hope is good thing, maybe the best of things, and nothing good ever dies." Is a quotation from the movie "The Shaw-shank Redemption". This Breakthrough Idea is the controversial use of hope in a changing environment. The article states clearly;
If you are an executive trying to lead an organization through change, know that hope can be a potent force in your favor. And it’s yours to give.
And I see absolutely nothing wrong with that sentiment.
An emerging hotbed of user centered innovation (Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics and Danish User-Centered Innovation Lab)The Danish Government's 2005 strategy for the next 4 years states that, “strengthening user-driven innovation" is a national priority. In response, a group of researchers from Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and MIT Sloan School of Management in the US - supported from Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs – now establish the Danish User-Centered Innovation Lab.
I will be paying close attention to this Danish initiative. This is a topic that suffers from a lack of research, however, it is new and extremely important. This software development project will hopefully develop many of the positive attributes of this worthwhile research.
Here comes XBRL;This Breakthrough Idea article notes SEC's Chairman Christopher Cox's initiative to use the XBRL reporting language. This is directly in line with what I had written on this blog back in
May 2006. The XBRL technology will be truely revolutionary, just as the Harvard Business Review notes.
"All this undoubtedly sounds too good to be true to managers who are rightfully jaded after decades of false promises that the next IT silver bullet is (this time, really!) just around the corner. So what makes XBRL different? Unlike all past technological developments, it doesn’t come in a wide variety of proprietary flavors, like ERP systems, operating systems, and customer relationship management systems, to name just a few. XBRL is an open-source standard that was developed by an international public consortium of nearly 500 organizations from 27 countries, including companies, investors, analysts, auditors, regulators, and aggregators of financial data, such as Standard & Poor’s. (For more background, see www.xbrl.org, the standard’s official Web site.)"
Innovation and Growth, Size Matters; (A future research Field)An interesting theory has been put forward here, one that I will be picking up as an area for future research. "Superlinear" growth could help to attain the metrics in performance that the industry needs. The individual energy industry clusters, such as Calgary, could potentially benefit from the knowledge that innovations can be leveraged from size.
"Though our research has focused on cities, the social and structural similarities between cities and firms suggest that our conclusions extend to companies and industries. If so, the existence of superlinear scaling that links size and creative output has two important consequences: First, it challenges the conventional wisdom that smaller innovation functions are more inventive, and perhaps explains why few organizations have ever matched the creativity of a giant like Bell Labs in its heyday. Second, it shows that because organizations and industries must apparently innovate at a continually accelerating rate to avoid stagnation, economizing by reflexively cutting R&D budgets and creative staffs may be a dangerous strategy over the long term."
The best Networks are really Worknets; (A future research field)Building off of
Metcalfe's Law which is essentially N Squared and applying it to a situation where-in a business collaborates at a large scale. Noting there is incremental value beyond what is aggregated. Something that is intuitively understood, but never quantified.
In Defence of Ready, Aim, Fire;How the open source software movement succeeds and provides value to business.
"This presents a conundrum for business. Clearly, firms can’t just start trying everything. Management overhead is real, and the costs of failure can’t simply be laid at employees’ feet. As a result, open system–like innovation must necessarily continue independent of any firm’s ability to either direct or capture all of the value. Some companies’ product lines or employee structures may not allow radical experimentation, but smart managers will look for ways to take advantage of this sort of broadly distributed effort. In environments where organizations can reduce the cost of failure by farming out a problem to individuals—who may be induced to participate solely by the chance to learn new skills or to gain the respect of peers—we can expect open systems to make increasing inroads into standard commercial efforts."
The folly of Accountabilism;There would be little to doubt that the need for accountability has escalated significantly in the past decade. This article deals with many of the related issues that stem from the abundance of accountability in business today. It's concluding comment accurately captures the issue;
"Accountabalism tries to squeeze centuries of thought about how to entice people toward good behavior and dissuade them from bad into simple rules by which individuals can be measured and disciplined. It would react to a car crash by putting stop signs at every corner. Bureaucratizing morality or mechanizing a complex organization gives us the sense that we can exert close control. But grown-ups prefer clarity and realism to happy superstition."
Seven out of twenty of these articles are directly related to the work being done here. Two provide new material for future research and one is a rich resource on the topic of user centered innovation.
Technorati Tags: Ideas, Open-Source, Innovation, Research, Genesys
