Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Each time I fly, I notice flight attendants taking passengers' food and drink orders on a pad of paper. I've thought for some time now that would be a perfect scenario for using a tablet device. So you can imagine just how pleased I was to learn recently that American Airlines (AA) is going to be doing just that.

"Is it possible to invent or innovate in a more open or collaborative manner, leveraging the intellect of inventors outside of a traditional corporate structure, given the current frameworks for IP protection?"

Innovation is the key to survival and prosperity. This is particularly true today, when the rapid advance -- and obsolescence -- of technology regularly changes the business environment.1 Such innovation is facilitated by opportunities to collaborate on electronic platforms.

We teach our children that sharing is a good thing. In the technology world, this is not always true. To be sure, many companies today benefit from, and even depend upon, jointly innovating with other entities. But sharing the wrong information with the wrong party, or even with the right party on the wrong terms, can be a disaster.

Innovation has been a key driver of economic growth, at least since the Industrial Revolution, whose beginning is usually assigned the birth date of 1750. The innovation process has been continually enhanced since then, and the protection of intellectual property (IP) is a key element of innovation. Yet there are several alternative ways to consider contributions to this long march forward. In this article, I highlight the importance of "collateral innovation," a mechanism that isn't studied in mainstream publications on innovation.

The recent blockbuster verdict in the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement case has journalists and pundits arguing with equal fervor about whether it represents the best or the worst of the American patent system. And while analysis of the trial's impact and the subsequent emotional arguments will continue, the case verdict reaffirms just how central patents are to today's technology industry.

With the rise of Big Data analytics and significant improvements in high-performance computing, it is likely that more knowledge-worker jobs will get displaced. Industry and academia are finding new ways of mining data and performing complex tasks previously done only by humans. IBM's Watson’s adroitness at Jeopardy may precede, by perhaps only a few years, general-purpose computing’s ability in diagnosing illnesses and processing complex business problems. Advanced image-processing capabilities can be applied to adding metadata to video files.

With the rise of Big Data analytics and significant improvements in high-performance computing, it is likely that more knowledge-worker jobs will get displaced. Industry and academia are finding new ways of mining data and performing complex tasks previously done only by humans.