January 2008
As I began my 10th year as editor-in-chief of Outlook a few weeks ago, I was thumbing through back issues of the journal. I was reminded of how much Outlook has changed since 1998. Our design is more crisp and contemporary and more visually exciting. The range of subjects explored by Accenture's professionals is wider and their analysis deeper and more rigorous, especially since the launch of our High Performance Business research program in 2003.
I did notice something that has been remarkably consistent, however: Outlook's ongoing interest in the topic of innovation. This is not surprising, of course; in the world of business, various studies and surveys have linked innovation to everything from shareholder value to CEO compensation. Indeed, as recently as our September 2007 issue, we published an article that took an in-depth look at the connection between the investment community's confidence in a company's long-term prospects (which Accenture calls the "future-value premium") and that company's ability to achieve growth through innovation.
By my reckoning, Outlook has revisited innovation more than two dozen times over the past 10 years, using all three of our basic article formats. A number of our case studies, for example, have looked at how companies manage innovation in the pharmaceuticals industry, where the pace and complexity of new-product development is particularly intense.
We've also explored the topic in interviews with a number of business and academic luminaries—ranging from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (he was just plain Mike Bloomberg, financial information mogul, at the time, and suggested that "there is a limit to how many new things people can use or absorb") to the editors of Harvard Business Review (they discussed the critical role ideas play in business) to the Oxford don who advised companies to adopt a process of "evolutionary innovation" based on principles borrowed from biology. And working with the Accenture Institute of High Performance Business, we published the first authoritative, quantitative ranking of the world's top 50 business intellectuals, the gurus whose stock-in-trade is new ideas.
Our feature articles have focused on innovation in the context of various business functions—marketing and customer relationship management, for example—as well as government services. And we've provided regular coverage of those technological innovations that change the way the world does business.
But what was most interesting to me was the common thread that runs through most of these articles—that at the end of the day, successful innovation is about harnessing the creative power of people. It's a thread picked up by two articles in this issue. Kishore Swaminathan, Accenture's chief scientist, has written a fascinating piece about the new generation of collaborative technologies that will dramatically improve the ability of companies to innovate. David Smith, managing director of Accenture's Talent & Organization Performance service line in North America, and Accenture Visiting Research Fellow and Outlook Contributing Editor Craig Mindrum offer a detailed description of the kind of discovery-and-dialogue-driven innovation network that organizations need to develop to capture value-creating ideas (See "How to Capture the Essence of Innovation," Outlook, January 2008).
For a complete list of articles on the subject, I invite you to visit Outlook Online at accenture.com; go to the Article Archive/By Subject pages and click on "Innovation." I hope you will find the work by Accenture's own innovators useful.
About the author
David Cudaback
Editor-in-Chief, Outlook
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