The workshop at World Economic Form was organized around six themes as fire starters for discussion about design and its potential role in effecting change.

• Clarity: Complex problems require simple, clear and honest solutions.
• Context: No solution should be developed and delivered in isolation, but should recognize its context in terms of time, place and culture.
• Inspiration: Successful solutions will move people by satisfying their needs, giving meaning to their lives and raising their hopes and expectations.
• Participation: Effective solutions will be collaborative, inclusive and developed with the people who will use them.
• Sustainability: Every solution needs to be robust, responsible and designed with regard to its long-term impact on the environment and society. Quality of the materials and design concept should be long-lasting.
• Transformation: Exceptional problems demand exceptional solutions that may be radical and even disruptive.

IVI has launched the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). The IT-CMF provides a concise management roadmap to optimize business value derived from IT investments. The IT-CMF consists of a five-stage maturity model which is used to organize and structure a framework for mapping IT improvement efforts. The holistic approach of the IT-CMF is shown through four macro process for each of the five maturity stages. These consist of Managing the IT Budget, Managing the IT Capability, Managing IT for Business Value, and Managing IT like a Business. Altogether, 36 individual processes are managed by the framework.

• ITIL is a set of techniques and concepts for helping manage IT infrastructure, development and operations.
• COBIT (ISACA, 2007) is another framework which has attracted significant adoption and has its roots in the information security and auditing domain.
• An extension of COBIT called VALIT (ISACA, 2008) extends the risk management and security focus into the domain of value management.
• CMMI (SEI, 2003) is used often for software development and project management practices in IT organizations.
• The IT Service CMM (Niessink, 2005) applies a CMM approach to the IT service Management aspect of IT and has gained some traction in the Netherlands and surrounding countries.

If you are already applying one or more of other frameworks listed above, how will you use integrate IT-CMF?

The following is a subset of Israeli companies that have leveraged technological mashups to solve drug delivery problems. It is a product of the multidisciplinary backgrounds that is obtained by combining military and civilian experiences. But it is also a way of thinking that produces particularly creative solutions and potentially opens new industries and “disruptive” advances in technology.

A cluster, as described by the author of the concept, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, is a unique model for economic development because it’s based on “geographic concentrations” of interconnected institutions – businesses, government agencies, and universities – in a specific field. Clusters product exponential growth for their communities because people living and working within the cluster are in some way connected to each other.

Examples –

• California’s “Wine Cluster” which is populated by hundreds of wineries and thousands of independent grape growers. There are also suppliers of grape stock, manufacturers of irrigation and harvesting equipment, producers of barrels, and designers of bottle labels, not to mention an entire media industry, with winery advertising firms and wine trade publications. The University of California at Davis, also near this area, has a world-renowned viticulture and oenology program. The Wine Institute is just north, in San Francisco, and the California legislature, in nearby Sacramento, has special committees dealing with wine industry.
• Italy’s “Fashion Cluster”
• Boston’s “Biotech Cluster”
• Hollywood’s “Movie Cluster”
• New York City’s “Wall Street Cluster”
• London’s “Finance Cluster”
• Northern California’s “Technology Cluster”
• Israel’s “Start-up Cluster”

Intense concentration of people working in and talking about the same industry provides companies with better access to employees, suppliers, and specialized information. “The social glue” that binds a cluster together also facilitates access to critical information. A cluster must be built around “personal relationships, face-to-face contact, a sense of common interest, and ‘insider’ status”.

Attracting new members to a cluster by offering a less expensive way to do business might be sufficient to create a cluster, but not to sustain it. If price is a cluster’s only competitive edge, some other country will always come along to do it more cheaply. The qualitative elements – such as tight-knit communities whose members are committed to living, working and raising families in the cluster – are what contribute to sustainable growth. Crucially, the cluster’s sense of shared commitment and destiny, which transcends day-to-day business rivalries, is not easy to manufacture.

While physical infrastructure can be built to create innovative companies or services hubs, the long term sustainability comes from cultural infrastructure to cultivate innovation.

Gary Hamel’s book on “The Future of Management” shares a quote from Nobel Prize winning zoologist Sir Peter Medawar – “Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers”.

A review of extensive library on managing change reveals a disturbing fact. Nearly all the accounts of deep change – entailing big shifts in a company’s business model or core mission – are stories of turnarounds. It seems that deep change is nearly always crisis-led, episodic, and programmatic – accomplished through a top-to-bottom, cascade of tightly scripted messages, events, goals, and actions. Sadly, it is a rarely opportunity-led, continuous, and a product of the organization’s intrinsic capacity to learn and adapt.

The subject of learning organizations has been talked about for many years through seminal work of Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization. Senge sets out the five ‘competent technologies’ that build and sustain learning organizations. His emphasis on systems thinking as the fifth, and cornerstone discipline allows him to develop a more holistic appreciation of organization (and the lives of people associated with them).

Learning Organization is one that acquires knowledge and innovates fast enough to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing environment. Learning organizations (1) create a culture that encourages and supports continuous employee learning, critical thinking, and risk taking with new ideas, (2) allow mistakes, and value employee contributions, (3) learn from experience and experiment, and (4) disseminate the new knowledge throughout the organization for incorporation into day-to-day activities.

While there has been a lot of talk about learning organizations it is very difficult to identify real-life examples. This might be because the vision is ‘too ideal’ or because it isn’t relevant to the requirements and dynamics of organizations.

So, how do you build and organization that is capable of continuous self-renewal in the absence of a crisis? Is innovation a random chance?

Does Innovation OR Operational Excellence have to be viewed as an either-or proposition for long term success? It’s inconceivable to try to innovate on all corporate priorities without having operational discipline and metrics to manage that. In the current economic downturn, organizations do not have luxury of choosing one versus the other. Collaboration is a critical element that allows enterprises to combine operational excellence and innovation. CAPEX and OPEX spending constraints, need to do more with less is increasing the need for Collaboration in the current environment. Collaboration is going to redefine the relationship between innovation and operational excellence. Ideas get stronger when they’re shared.  The quality and speed of decision-making improves dramatically when people with diverse view points and expertise come together rapidly with shared goals.

For example, CISCO is driving Innovation & Operational Excellence by connecting people, information, and communities on a global basis via segment councils, cross functional boards and expert working groups.

Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Dell, Best Buy, Threadless, Microsoft, and Nike have all created digital platforms that allow customers to help them create new products, messages or seek feedback. Starbucks received over 17,000 coffee ideas in the first 14 months since the launch of its proprietary online forum, mystarbucksidea.com. Customers, of course, are increasingly demanding participation. They expect the ability to co-create and lead innovation, and their volubility has forced companies to devise creative solutions to be competitive in a new bottom-up age.

Crowdsourcing is not just limited to marketing materials – in this new era of digital marketing the concept is spreading to embrace software development as well. Same principle – you have a need and someone out there can help you meet that need, it’s just a case of finding them.

My opinion is shift from having a reactive culture to one that’s proactive by seeking ideas from the crowd will be disruptive. Transparency of the ideas generated by the crowd; and accountability – how are the ideas making their way into products; will have to be embraced. Of course, there has to be a delicate balance between encouraging participation and maintaining clarity of overall business objectives. As crowdsourcing continues to accelerate, the biggest question is how it will affect business writ large. But it will certainly usher in radical changes to business models and business systems.

To provide practical guidance on building a breakthrough business within a profitable old one, innovation experts Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble share 10 Rules –

1. In all great innovation stories, the great idea is only Chapter 1. Building breakthrough businesses requires forgetting, borrowing, and learning. These central challenges demand more than just a talented and ambitious leader; they require leveraging the power of organizational DNA.

2. Sources of organizational memory are powerful. Organizations naturally cling to Core Company’s orthodoxy, even when moving into new environments. But New Company needs to operate in fundamentally different ways.

3. Large, established companies can beat start-ups if they can succeed in leveraging their enormous assets and capabilities.

4. Strategic experiments face critical unknowns. No amount of research can resolve these unknowns before the business is launched. Therefore, success depends more on an ability to experiment and learn than on the initial strategy.

5. The New Company organization must be built from scratch, with new choices in staffing, structure, systems, and culture. This is only way to defeat the powerful forces of institutional memory. Conversational awareness of the differences between New and Core company business models does not suffice.

6. Managing tensions is job one for senior management. The health of the links between New and Core Company deteriorates easily. There are several natural sources of tension, driven by dynamic forces – particularly the changing demand for and supply of capital within the organization.

7. New company needs its own planning process. Core Company’s norms for evaluating business performance will disrupt New Company’s learning.

8. Interest, influence, internal competition, and politics disrupt learning. To ensure learning, you must take a disciplined, detached, and analytical approach to making predictions and interpreting differences between predictions and outcomes.

9. Hold New Company accountable for learning and not results. You can achieve accountability for learning by insisting on a disciplined learning process. Accountability for results against plan, while simpler to practice, is counterproductive.

10. Companies can build a capacity for breakthrough growth through strategic innovation. Skills in forgetting, borrowing, and learning are the foundation. Managers must start building these organization skills early in a company’s life.

I learnt a lot by reading recent Business Week about the Game changing ideas for business. The list of articles talk about what & how the companies are testing few ideas in the market place. Some of the most powerful and lasting management methods were launched during the tough times, when companies needed to manage costs and grow. The following is a list of biggest ideas over the past 100 years -

1910	The Assembly Line – With demand soaring for his Model T, Henry Ford took cues from brewers’ conveyor systems and slaughterhouses’ overhead trolleys to build his assembly line, increasing annual production from 78,000 cars in 1910 to 2 million by the 1920s.
1920	Market Segmentation – General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan managed GM’s car models through loosely monitored “divisions,” which operated as separate companies with Sloan’s oversight, laying the groundwork for today’s corporation.
1931	Brand Management – After Procter & Gamble began targeting soap brands to different demographics, it set up brand management, an organizational structure that makes individual managers responsible for each brand’s success.
1943	Skunk Works – To build a new fighter jet in just 143 days, Lockheed created an organization called Skunk Works, which used small groups and advance funding to work with little interference from its corporate parent.
1950s	Lean Manufacturing – After a 1950 strike, Toyota workers were given lifetime employment. Manager Taiichi Ohno developed ways to up efficiency without cutting jobs, leading to “pull production” in 1954 and “Total Quality Control” in 1961.
1969	Scenario Planning – The practice involves envisioning multiple future events and developing plans for responding to them. Shell first experimented with scenario planning in 1967, helping it navigate the oil shock of the 1970s.
1973	360-degree Reviews – Getting feedback from peers, managers, and underlings may be the scourge of time-strapped managers. But when companies first adopted these reviews (DuPont was first in 1973), they were seen as a leap ahead.
1987	Six Sigma – Invented at Motorola, the process, designed to reduce defects and increase efficiency, is most associated with General Electric. Widely used today, the jargon-laden tool has been the butt of recent jokes on TV sitcoms such as 30 Rock
1989	Outsourcing – While the practice of hiring outside tech services dates to the 1960s, outsourcing took root later. In 1989, IBM landed a deal to manage Kodak’s data-processing needs. By the 1990s, much of that work started moving offshore.
1990	Reengineering – Technically defined as a radical rethinking of processes, the fad was often associated with the layoffs it spurred and with consultant Michael Hammer, who cited Ford in his 1990 article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.”
2000s	Open Innovation – Many companies are ditching fears of “not invented here.” Instead, they are buying or licensing inventions and collaborating with companies and customers. Procter & Gamble aims to capture half of its innovations from outsiders.