Why Innovation in the Knowledge Era Will Change Everything

In my recent post about innovation ecosystems, you may have noticed two of my introductory slides about the knowledge era and innovation. I’d like to expand on that here.

This graph is taken from PBS’ The First Measured Century (a fun resource if you have never seen it). It’s a snapshot of employment trends (of men only) in the 20th century, the story of which was clearly dominated by the industrial era. Read more

Knowledge is a fundamentally different kind of economic asset

You have probably heard of the the Knowledge Era. You know that we shifted from the Industrial to the Knowledge Era sometime in the recent past. What you may not understand is the implication of this shift for economics–and for your own organization.

The big difference comes from this simple fact: Knowledge is infinite. Yes, you heard me correctly. Knowledge is an infinite asset. Giving it away or selling it does not diminish your supply of knowledge. This infinite nature of knowledge conflicts with one of the most basic assumptions of the economics that most of learned in school: Read more

The Moment is Now to Leverage Our Knowledge Intangibles

Intangibles make up 70% of the value of the average company. They drive competitive advantage. They determine the innovation capacity of a company. Yet they continue to be ignored.

And now we are at a moment of truth. Our economy seemingly made huge progress in the past decades. Computers created efficiencies and fueled profits. They also enabled many white collar jobs to be moved off shore along with manufacturing work. The economic consequences of this outsourcing and the mothballing of so much of our economic infrastructure were hidden by a series of economic booms in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Then the “Great Recession” of 2008-09 exposed the fact that our economy was running on consumer spending fueled by financial profits that have long since disappeared. Today, we lack sources of job creation and true economic growth. Add to this economic challenge the even greater ones created by serious concerns about our environment, our energy use, our health care system, even our food production. We are in a very difficult position. Read more

Comments on IC 2.0 recorded for ECIC 2010

At the invitation of some colleagues from the intellectual capital community, I just posted some ideas on how to move our field to a new stage, what we have all been calling IC 2.0–an approach to IC that focuses on how to engage businesspeople and get IC thinking into a broad range of businesses. Take a look and let me know what you think! Read more

Don’t Separate Innovation and Intangible Capital

There has been a discussion going on at Blogging Innovation and BankerVision about the move from the knowledge economy to the innovation economy–and the need for companies to develop innovation capital.

I would like to argue that the knowledge economy and the innovation economy are the same thing.  Not just to argue but to keep the focus where it needs to be. Read more

Huge Opportunities for Innovation — Corporate intangible capital is ready and waiting

Although the economic recovery is slowly building up steam, there is still a lot of work to do. For one thing, we need the economic recovery to turn into a jobs recovery. To do that, we need to start doing things differently. Solve new problems. In a word, innovate.

That’s why I am thankful that Ken Jarboe just revisited Business Week’s piece entitled Obama’s 25 Ways to Rebuild America. When I read this list, I get excited because it shows how many opportunities we have to fundamentally innovate and rebuild our economy: Read more

McKinsey’s New Innovation Metric

I have faulted McKinsey before for suggesting simplistic metrics that can provide interesting historical data but be very dangerous as guides to management. So I read their latest suggestion on tracking innovation performance score with some skepticism.

They don’t really explain how they calculate it but the sense of it is that they look at how much a company outperforms its competition over a five to seven year period and assume that this compound annual growth rate is a measure of a firm’s innovation performance. Here are a few thoughts. Read more

What will next year’s Labor Day look like?

Today is a strange Labor Day. The holiday was created as a way to get back to work. Yet the U.S. economy currently has a high unemployment rate, not counting those that have stopped looking for work and those that are independent and/or permanent contractors, whose work (or lack of) does not get counted in these statistics.

This unemployment is happening at a moment of incredible challenge (and, yes, opportunity). The challenges facing our nation (and our globe) include the need for sustainable energy production and use (to avoid wars and to save the environment), the need for sensible health care, the need for healthy food and the need for better education (I’m sure you can think of many more). Each one of these challenges represents opportunities that could fuel our economy for decades.

Yet here we sit. Paralyzed by assumptions and models that are failing us. Read more

Using Intellectual Capital to Build Two Kinds of Factories

Yesterday, I drove my mother to the airport in Providence RI after a vacation on Cape Cod. The route from Cape Cod to Providence is a mini-history lesson. You pass through New Bedford which has been a fishing hub for centuries–and still is. You pass  through Fall River which has dozens of shuttered factories built during the industrial era. There is still some manufacturing going on there. But it doesn’t look very prosperous. Of course, neither is our country. We never really replaced all the jobs that those factories created in the last couple centuries.

I have been thinking about manufacturing a lot lately. Because I am increasingly convinced that it is the key to an economic recovery. But not like those old factories in Fall River. A whole new kind of manufacturing. Read more

Redeploying Agricultural Intellectual Capital

The challenges facing the food industry provide an important chapter in the story about the end of the industrial era.

In past posts, I have talked about how the large industrial model has lead to dangerous monocultures in bananas and unsustainable concentration of salad green production in the Salinas Valley. There is a growing realization that we need to think about sustainability in agriculture. This is a significant challenge–but also an enormous opportunity. Read more

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