The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through...

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 304 pages
• Published by: McGraw-Hill
• Edition: 1st Edition April 8, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0071598286
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0071598286
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

Product Description


From the greatest minds in business today comes a groundbreaking new blueprint for executing the next stage of customer-created value. C.K. Prahalad, the world's premier business thinker, and IT scholar M.S. Krishnan unveil the critical missing link in connecting strategy to execution--building organizational capabilities that allow companies to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation.

The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage.

In this landmark work, Prahalad and Krishnan explain how to accomplish this shift--one where IT and the management architecture form the corporation's fundamental foundation. This book provides strategies for

• Redesigning systems to co-create value with customers and connect all parts of a firm to this process
• Measuring individual behavior through smart analytics
• Ceaselessly improving the flexibility and efficiency in all customer-facing and back-end processes
• Treating all involved individuals--customers, employees, investors, suppliers--as unique
• Working across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global network
• Building teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly

To successfully compete on the battlefields of 21st-century business, companies must reinvent their processes and culture in order to sustain innovative solutions. The New Age of Innovation is a complete program for achieving this transformation to meet the requirements of the end consumer of the future.

Back Cover Copy


The new global standard for innovation and corporate growth

“Prahalad and Krishnan show us how innovation will be driven by the seamless integration of strategy, business processes, technology, and people. While this may seem an insurmountable task, the authors delight the reader by creating an architectural framework for business transformation. I have yet to come across a book that offers such a clear roadmap.”-S. Ramadorai CEO Tata Consultancy Services

“A great analysis of the challenges facing business today. Personalization of an individual consumer’s experience, globalization, global logistics, evolving business processes and information technology creates great complexity. C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan provide a framework to structure this complexity. Once understood, standardized and simplified these drivers provide an enviable foundation for innovation.” —Ralph Szygenda, Chief Information Officer, General Motors

“Prahalad and Krishnan argue that to create value in a flattening world, companies must develop highly flexible innovation strategies that 'fold the future in.' To do this, they must partner with truly global networks of partners and customers—and rethink everything from their core capabilities to their corporate culture. Prahalad’s and Krishnan’s book is a compelling roadmap for this next phase of globalization.” —Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft

Reader Reviews
This book is certainly worth reading, and especially by those executives that do not read much (the ones with the big egos and short attention spans). I admire the authors, but I am also increasingly annoyed by the annoying self-referential insularity that charactizes "star" authors who seem to not have read much by anyone else. Publishers need to begin demanding a proper literature search and more due diligence in "connecting" the reader to dots created by others. Let's be crystal clear: Stewart Brand, the original editor of the Co-Evolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Review, and the founder of the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference, did more inthe 1970's and 1980's for the concept of co-creating value that this pair will ever achieve. More recently, in the 1990's and the past ten years, Collective Intelligence, the Power of Us (a Business Week cover story twenty June 2005 that the author's do not deign to notice), Wisdom of the Crowds, Smart Mobs, and so on, have all focused on the core concept of co-creation of value. This book loses one star for its pretentions as an immaculate conception of a core concept that has been understood by the rest of us for the past forty years. Now, having vented in defense of other scholars and practitioners that the authors should have respected, here are my flyleaf notes that easily warrant a solid four. + Roadmap for business leaders that does a superb job of showing how strategy and business processes both need to receive more respect as well as deliberate management. + Every individual must be treated as a singular client, and no firm has the resources to do it all--being able to connect the single client with a need and the single third party able to meet the need may be the ultimate business process. + Most interesting to me, as a deep admirer of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, the book that showed me my final calling as intelligence officer to the public, for which I and 23 others created a non-profit, the authors drop the one billion extreme poor from their client list, and focus only on the 4 billion above that line. + Properly embraced, these four billion are billed by the authors--accurately and wisely in my view--as a major source of innovation and need that can power the global economy by 2015. + Role of Information Technology (IT), which Paul Strassmann has demonstrated is often a negative return on investment, is to bridge the gap between strategic intent and "capacity to act." + Analytics in this book are primarily mathematic and data mining of existing digital information, with a token reference to external information. "Intelligence," "decision support," "competitive intelligence," and "commercial intelligence" are not terms to be found in this book. The authors appear to be oblivious to the existence of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) founded in 1986 and just now beginning to reach its potential. + The authors place great emphasis on the importance of the individual employee and customer, and again arouse my ire as they fail to refer back to such giants as Wilensky, Carkhuff, or Cleveland (see list of ten books they either have not read or have chosen to forget). + Global standards plus local effectiveness is the key to mobilizing four billion new consumers. + They emphasize the importance of understanding the "hidden costs of the inflexible and archaic internal systems that exist in most firms." They might also have thought to cite Ben Gilad on how most information reaching CEOs is late, biased, subjective, incomplete, and often wrong. + The three core concepts for the manager in a hurry to retain are: first, treat all others (consumers, employees, suppliers, regulators) as co-equals; second, do continuous analytics; and third, be ready to be turn on a dime. Efficiency is TIRED, flexibility (which means some redundancy) is WIRED. For myself the real eye-opener in this book was the several case studies of what FedEx and others are doing with the detail that they amass from making their entire system transparent--not only are they tracking every package, but also every link and every inquiry--and then making sense of that to offer new services to specific INDIVIDUALs. I also appreciated the references to IBM's "ecosystem" of individuals and talents, and the emphasis on how many complex tasks can be "de-skilled" and migrated to very low-cost largely uneducated individuals, spreading the wealth while reserving the higher loads for increasingly scarce "full operational capability" programmers and managers. I liked the authors' reference to A. V. Dhamakrishnan of Ramco India, and his focus on "evidence-based management" (page 165. I am considering publication of a work by many others on Health Intelligence, and the term I have found that rocks the health industry every time is "evidence-based medicine." The authors conclude that social networks are now moving into business-oriented collaboration platforms, and provide a listing of offerings that is long and interesting but not at all complete. Visit ArnoldIT.com for the real edge of the IT envelope. This is a very fine book. It may be that publishers need to commission the literature survey, and then identify others to write forewords and afterwords that connect the dots. In no way do I demean the brilliant building block provided by this book--I am simply irritated that it hangs in space as an immaculate conception with no respect demonstrated for the considerable work by others--and to publish a book in 2008 and not even note the Business Week cover story of twenty June 2005 on "The Power of Us," sorry, but that merits a spanking all by itself. Due diligence, anyone? Other books, both old and new: The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity The Knowledge Executive Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry) Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books) Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace The authors might wish to demonstrate in their writing that which they preach so assidiously in this book.