BW this week has a whole issue of articles on creativity and innovation. You HAVE to beg, borrow, steal or buy this issue. Some powerful themes:
- " "What was once central to corporations - price, quality ....is fast being shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians..."
"Increasingly the new core-competence is creativity..."
"The Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new - call it the Creativity Economy"
and a bunch of innovation examples in the issue.
More ammunition for CIOs to crunch "utility" IT spend n their budgets and move more to innovation budgets. Kudos to companies like Hertz, Starbucks and others I have cataloged below which have already been using IT innovations for years to improve customer, partner or employee experiences. CFOs, VP of HR and others can similarly crunch their own utility spend by effectively using BPO.
Two big gating factors in all this:
1) the emotional reaction to global competition in the West as I have written in a series of posts on China/India.
2) vendor behavior. As I wrote in The Giant Crunching Sound, incumbent utility vendors are sucking up way too many dollars and continue to expect innovation pricing. If anything, the stampede to outsource may inflate those costs even more as I wrote in The Economics of cheap.
Keep on crunching...and keep on innovating.
