Big consulting firms play a crucial role in the strategic management of companies. But how did they themselves design strategies of their own? During a seminar in the Ecole de Paris, Christopher McKenna (Oxford University) looked back on the history of an industry characterized by a somewhat ambiguous relationship to innovation.
It's been less than fifteen years since the issue of green chemistry has become a matter of public debate, yet it now seems to prove strategic for that industry. Far from being a mere compliance with standards dictated by regulations, this is a matter of strong industrial choices - choices by no means limited to developing new processes, but truly involving a major overhaul of the chemistry industry.
Have you heard of Twollars yet? Maybe not, but by now you've probably heard of Facebook credits. Social networks are developing virtual currencies who could be used by hundreds of millions of consumers, with consequences whose scale we are just beginning to measure. Where will the cash flows derived from these transactions transit?
Whether in business schools, firms or in the specialized press, innovation is a highly praised value. What if it were a myth? The road to success could also lie in the art of imitation. The examples stand before us: Apple, EasyJet, and Wal-Mart are well-known innovative companies. And yet, their success was largely built on their ability to combine both innovation and imitation.
Technology-enabled home health care should be thriving. An aging population and the transformation of acute illnesses such as heart failure into chronic diseases mean that the number of patients is growing. In addition, new medical-technology devices could help keep patients at home rather than in costly institutions, such as assisted-living facilities or nursing homes - leading to potentially big savings for the health care systems. Instead, the full potential of the technology-enabled home health care market remains to be tapped.
It was a mere dream ten years ago, an emerging market only three years ago. Today, the e-book is on the verge of transforming drastically the publishing industry. The arrival of e-readers has sent the demand through the roof and by 2015, within developed nations, digital media could represent 20% of the book market in value. The radical transformation of the value chain puts publishers under heavy stress with the arrival of new players.
The U.S. Senate just passed a bill reforming the patent system, without appeasing controversies that for the past ten years have been agitating academic circles as well as the Silicon Valley. Patents are generally considered to fuel innovation. But do they?
The prospects for electric cars have not looked so good since 1899, when Belgian Camille Jenatzy's car, le Jamais Contente, became the first automobile to break 100 kilometers per hour. But one last hurdle remains: the charging infrastructure.
When the French poet Louis Aragon wrote the line "the weight of the future pushes each present moment back to but a memory", its application to either the internet or management would never have entered his mind. And yet, the words of the great poet resonate for the contemporary challenge of information technology in enterprise.
Commercial space travel, breakthroughs in the fight against cancer, a new industrial revolution based on broadly distributed clean energy -even now, despite global warming and overpopulation, the future is still looking bright to some leading futurists. But before you book that trip to the moon, keep in mind that predictions are rarely spot on. When it comes to technology, making the right call is surprisingly rare -even among its inventors.
Nearly 40 years ago, telecommuting looked like an unstoppable trend. Today, it still does. Why is this revolution taking so long and what will the future of work look like when it finally arrives?
In an economic climate of constant transformation at ever increasing speed, the classical model of innovation, incremental by design, no longer ensures survival against the menace of obsolescence. As new competitors arrive on the market and constantly raise the stakes in terms of quality the continued existence of an enterprise rests on its ability to create ruptures with the past and move forward in a constant state of revolutionary innovation.
The revolution in Tunisia and the toppling of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak resemble any number of prior upheavals, except for one thing - the role played by social media. Facebook, in particular, which once seemed just a high-tech way for teenagers to waste time, is now emerging as an important political tool. Why has social media been so useful to the protesters in North Africa? How will it be applied next? Will it really change the world?
Green Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is no longer a distant dream. GreenTouch, a global consortium organized by Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, is spearheading an initiative to innovate and create technologies that will allow networks to achieve an increase in energy efficiency by a factor of 1000. The hope is that the energy required to power today's communications networks, the internet included, for one day will eventually be enough to last... three years.
More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.
The furor over the WikiLeaks affair graced headlines of newspapers across the globe and illuminated the nebulous world of hackers and internet pirates. Questions have been raised over the unseen threads that connect actors on both sides of the law. What links do they have with states and large corporations? Are they completely outside the capitalist system? Piracy has a storied history with lessons for the current situation that Rodolphe Durand, Professor of strategy at HEC and co-author of L'Organisation pirate (Le bord de l'eau, 2010), recently discussed.
Efforts to forecast our future fall short of a perfect dream where events can be weighed and measured with the predictability more commonly found in cookbooks the world over. If predictions could be made with the same degree of certainty that a baker employs then where would we find the creative drive to innovate ? In an increasingly uncertain world is it even possible for random acts of genius ? Can we embrace chaos and harness its power ? The paradox is that to plan for the future we must discard the limits of our present. When we accept this seeming contradiction the need for a stable hand is clear if we are to successfully identify the sea that acts as the ultimate source of attraction.
The ever expanding palette of tools available to national authorities in their struggle to meet the energy needs of the future has grown to include fiscal incentives, quotas on production and the creation of feed-in tariffs on renewable energy sources. European Commission directives on the harmonization of renewable energy policy have taken on a greater urgency and as the measures implemented gain traction it would be wise to look back at the road already travelled and take the measure of the success or failure of decisions by focusing on the paths followed in Germany, Spain and France.
For every iPod, iPhone -or now, perhaps, iPad- hundreds of new technological products don't quite make it. What separates the winners from the also-rans? Scholars at ParisTech and the Wharton School in Philadelphia who have studied technology adoption say a variety of factors determine whether a product becomes a hit- and that with digitalization, the process is becoming more complex all the time.
In today's era of plenty, many factors, including well-publicised health scares, lack of trust in risk control systems and a fear of new technology have resulted in a backlash against transgenic plants and their use in food in Europe. Attitudes to genetically modified organisms in medicine or even in agriculture in North America are different. However, the factors that contribute to this wariness in Europe should be examined because of their potential impact on innovations in all fields.
