re-inventing-innovation.com

I recently realized that this September will be the 25th anniversary of the launch of CIO Magazine.

I wrote the cover piece for that first issue — “The New Breed of CIO” — and the first paragraph of my article discussed the emergence of a new group of business leaders who were making “the leap from ‘manager of information systems’ to ‘chief information officer…’ and that these CIOs were taking on a new duty as “promoter of the company’s ‘information vision.’”

And even more recently, I also have come across Gartner’s new “Predicts 2012″ report that discusses “how the control of technology and technology-driven decisions is shifting out of the hands of IT organizations. New forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending. Specifically, the forces of cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a rapid pace.”

And, maybe most interesting (and most ominous for CIOs), Gartner says that “Business unit stakeholders often recognize the value of new technology before IT departments can harness it.”

There’s a lot to be said for the Garnter position –in fact, it connects with the “Schumpeter on Steroids” description that has come up in previous postings in this blog — and I plan to address and explore the Gartner insights in future postings.

In the meantime, here are some links that some might find of interest.

My September 1987 article about “The New Breed of CIO” (my apologies for the fuzziness of the PDF).

Three documents from Gartner about their Predicts 2012 report:

A press release about the report

A summary of the report

A PDF with more extended discussion of the report

This relatively short article is packed with interesting ideas .. some explicitly mentioned, some not so much.

My View On ‘The New Socialism’

These three points particularly jumped out at me.

A – Online social media is growing at an extraordinary rate, already representing an extraordinary share of the total time that many consumers spend on media.

B – There are no better examples of the changing business and pricing models than newspaper classifieds and Craigslist.

1. The former has made all participants — sellers, advertisers, subscribers — pay dearly, while pocketing outsized profit margins.
2. The latter only requires a tiny fraction of the participants to pay relatively little, and still pockets outsize profit margins.

Of course, the $100 million that Craigslist might generate this year is only a fraction of the billions of dollars that it displaced.

Isn’t this combination of #1 and #2 a huge (socialist?) redistribution of wealth?!

C – Online media exposures are growing at an extraordinary rate, maybe even exponentially. The future is not about delivering “cheaper, faster” impressions. It is about delivering results — helping people find things, helping people buy things, helping people sell things.

I am not sure that is quite right, but it definitely is an interesting perspective!

It is great to see that The Economist is using “Schumpeter” as the name for a new column on business and management that it is launching.

I am looking forward to becoming a loyal reader.

In response to the launch of this new column, I am posting this slightly revised version of an item that I wrote a little over two years ago.

Back then, I made the argument that it is vital to begin to re-think Schumpeter’s important contributions and his signature notion of how “the perennial gale of creative destruction” plays a central role in capitalism.

Despite all the deserved attention that Schumpeter is getting, there is an important issue that also merits discussion, namely:

The way that quantitative changes in the amount and the rate of Schumpeterian transformation are triggering important qualitative changes in the nature of Schumpeter’s creative destruction.

In fact, a tsunami of “Industrial-Strength Creative Destruction” is flooding across virtually every part of the world…and our encounter with “Schumpeter on Steroids” is cramming unprecedented change and transformation into every nook and cranny of the planet.

If you look back to the first half of the 20th century, you can see that the industrialization and mass-production of manufactured goods began to radically change not only the quantity of those goods, but also the nature of the goods that were produced and the roles that those products played in our lives.

In an analogous sense, the new “mass-production of creative destruction” has important implications for the role and nature of Schumpeterian change…and for the role and nature of innovation in today’s world.

I’ve touched upon these issues in several “Articles from the Archives” that already have made it onto this site (for example, In Praise of Bad Ideas and Nobel Laureate on R&D Changes), and I expect to be exploring other implications – specific and general – in future postings.

So, stay tuned for more…much more.

In the meantime, here are few links to a selection of notable recent items about Schumpeter and to the book that spurred my initial posting back in 2007, the biography of Schumpeter by Pulitzer-winning historian Thomas K. McCraw.

• Fifty years on, Schumpeter’s brand of capitalism is all the rage – This piece from the Globe and Mail does a nice job of outlining Schumpeter’s key ideas and connecting them to a number of current business and economic developments, e.g., the emergence of China, the growing role of private equity.
• The SUMMER BOOKS ISSUE from The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship (NDE) – The NDE has included McGraw’s book on a fascinating list of readings about entrepreneurship and innovation.
• Unfettered finance is fast reshaping the global economy – In this excellent piece in the Financial Times, Martin Wolf makes a strong argument that “We are witnessing the transformation of mid-20th century managerial capitalism into global financial capitalism”…and sketches out a few of the early implications that are beginning to emerge.