Nice summary of the research behind the new book Big Shift by John Hagel and John Seely Brown at Harvard Business blogs. This book outlines some longer-range metrics of business performance, and highlights some interesting trends with respect to American corporate business competitiveness.
To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial-era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial processes that go with them) and operational practices in favor of the new institutional architectures and business practices needed to create and capture economic value in the era of the Big Shift.
Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era's fast-moving digital infrastructure.
