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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4012
EAN num: 9780071598286
ISBN number: 0071598286
Label: McGraw-Hill
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: April 08, 2008
Publishing house: McGraw-Hill
Sale Popularity Level: 11086
Studio: McGraw-Hill
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Product Description:
From the greatest minds in business yesterday comes a groundbreaking new blueprint for executing the subsequent 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 quickly
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 needs of the end consumer of the future.
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Rated by buyers 
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I really respect Prahalad, but this book is probably the worst I have read about innovation (the title is misleading because the book is not about 'Innovation' at all). He iterates around two simple ideas of current 'drivers' for innovation (R=1 N=G), which are crystal clear for most of us who live in this globalized world.
The book is full of anecdotes poorly constructed, that barely address the point he tries to make and that have very little academic rigor. His constant references to ICICI, ING and so on are tiring.
For drivers of innovation, go to tradicional literature such as Schumpeter. Utterback and Christiansen are also very good. For something more practical information about innovation embedding, read 'Innovation to the Core' or 'Innovator's Guide to Growth'.
Rated by buyers 
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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. Publishing houses 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 20 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 10 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 ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Hamel and Prahalad made us think about the core competences of organisations. Now, Prahalad and co-author Krishnan introduce us to two new equations for a world that will be driven by co-creation and global networks. In their recent book 'The new age of innovation' they describe what R=G and N=1 will mean for your organisation.
Profs. Prahalad and Krishnan describe how individual corporations have been aggregating the needs of consumers and mass produced products and services for them for a long time. The variation was in size, colour and other attributes, but that was it. Nowadays, we see a move where multiple corporations are working on fulfilling the needs of individual consumers. To deliver these personal solutions, corporations do not focus on what's available within their own boundaries or supply-chain. They use whatever is available wherever in the world. In short, it is all about individual choice (N=1) and global resources (R=G).
Convincingly, they describe what this means for the social architecture and the technical architecture of the firm. In a world with global acess to resources, there is a need for processes and availability of data in a transparent and coherent way. Otherwise, work cannot be sourced globally. On top of this, you also have to think about dynamic reconfiguration and demand anticipation. From the consumer side, you have to focus on the preferences of individuals and the capacity to co-create with consumers.
It all may sound a little high-level, many examples and cases are used to illustrate the point though. The book does not deliver a simple recipe to deal with all the described trends. It does show necessary steps and needed infrastructure, but not all these elements are readily available or completely understood at the moment.
I agree with the other reviews that the title of the book can catch you off guard if you really expect a book on innovation. Nevertheless, the authors present their case in an original way. It is also clear some serious strategic consequences follow from the two simple formulas of N=1 and R=G. Well worth the read!
Rated by buyers -
This book is an odd one. I liked the content, and the ideas presented. In fact, I forwarded several of the ideas and examples found in the book to my corporate office for consideration. The problem is, for some reason, the book reads choppy. It jumps from one company to another, citing examples of what they are doing in relation to the thesis, but these citations lack depth.
Still, there are stellar ideas inside this book. The only problem is that one has to continually cherry pick ideas from the book. I think everyone could gain information inside. Just not all of it. I would still recomment this book, even with that thought in mind.
Rated by buyers 
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The New Age of Innovation is good but miss-titled. This is not a book about how to be innovative. Rather the book advances an idea that all companies must face a world where they deal with customers individually and get their resources globally. The authors drive this home in a mantra of N=1 (there is one customer) and R=G (your resources are global). The N=1 R=G idea is cute and it is used throughout the book,but as you read the book N=1 R=G becomes the rational for everything and therefore nothing.
It is hard to give a book that covers such a breadth of important topics a mediocre review, but I have thought about this and come to the conclusion that this book is O.K. I am glad I read it as there are some good things here, just not to the level that I could heartily recommend it. If you are interested in these ideas and study the subject of enterprise strategy and management, then please buy this book as it will round out your experience. If you are looking for innovative ideas, then I am sorry this is not the book for you - in my opinion.
Besides the book not being about innovation, or really about how you drive co-created value, it is pretty good with some very good ideas. Prahalad and Krishnan start with an interesting premise - that all markets are not individual and that no company will have all the resources at its disposal to serve those individual markets. Put that way it provides a fresh way of thinking about global business. However that fresh thinking quickly devolves into a way of explaining a large range of business decisions from Wal-Mart to UPS, to GM to ICICI and others. I am always suspicious when a framework can cover such a diverse set of companies - not that the framework is poor, but rather that it is capturing something that we already know and have already dealt with. That is more the case in this book and the reason why it gets only 3 stars.
This book had the potential to redefine some basic tenants of corporate thinking - in other words extend beyond Treacy and Wiersema value disciplines. The N=1 R=G is a simple framework that requires blending multiple disciplines to delivery. However, the book does not do that - rather it advances the idea of intergration across all fronts without a target destination. This makes the book comprehensive, but it also makes it disjointed in some areas and therefore difficult to see how it would really apply to my company or my situation.
Strengths:
The presentation of these two ideas (customer centrality and global sourcing) is strength in that these issues are rarely discussed in an integrated fashion.
Incorporation of a comprehensive view of the enterprise including its business processes, analytics/information, information technology and social/managerial technologies. Few books have ever looked at the enterprise from such a multi-faceted view.
Chapter 6 on efficiency and flexibility, it should have been the second chapter of the book as it puts the N=1 R=G into a set of clear management decisions.
The book highlights the need for the interconnectedness of the issues involved. It continually points to the need for process connectedness, visibility and transparency. It also points out the need to address decisions that are often thought of as contradictory (chapter 6) and the tools in figure 4.3 (p. 129)
Weaknesses:
The discusion of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is bold in its vision but very weak in its implementation. (See Chapter 4 review) The book talks about ICT in a major way in three chapters and not the same way in any of them.
Using multiple titles and tags for roughly the same thing which makes it unnecessarily complicated. This is seen in the way the book tries to redefine issues like business process transformation, capabilities, components, change management etc. It would have been better to use standard terms and then talked about the new insight based on the ideas of the book.
It is true that India is a hot bed of innovation and growth but to imply that Indian companies are primarily the ones that get these ideas is a bit uneven. There are many innovative and market capturing companies in India (ICICI is one that we all need to study and understand). However, the authors keep returning to these companies as the prime examples of what sucess will look like. This refocusing, particularly on the Indian software industry, weakens the book as it gives the reader with the miss-impression that all I need is an educated, cheap and plentiful labor source and my problems are solved - that is too simplistic and undercuts what these leaders have done.
References as there is neither a single footnote nor source in the book, when several sections are clearly based on work that I have read before. I am not saying that they are copying ... Read More
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