It is often asked whether a company should be a fast follower or first mover to innovation.  The answer to the question depends upon what sort of innovation you are talking about.

The future opportunity to create a benefit (and hopefully wealth) applies equally to the creation of novel and new things, as it does to provision of a more evolved and industrialized component.  In the former case, the benefit is through a visible differential advantage – that is, something that you have and that competitors don’t yet.  In the latter cases, the benefit is through efficiency in provision – that is, competitors provide the same act but you provide the act more efficiently.

One firm’s employee is another firm’s customer. This means that the great majority of businesspeople are both customers and employees at the same time. Yet today, most firms treat their customers and their employees as if they were entirely different species. This is especially true with information technology. We take for granted that customers should be able to use whatever devices and internet services they want, but employee IT is often tightly constrained. Tensions have been inevitable.

At first, it feels like a bad, even offensive idea. After the shooting of children in Newtown, reports of chemical weapons in Syria, threats of nuclear missile attacks from North Korea, and now the bombings in my home town of Boston, why would anyone make a play on the words ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’?

One of the highlights of our 2013 US Executive Forum held in Washington DC on March 13 was the sharply contrasting talks given by two of today’s leading digital economy thinkers. First up was MIT’s Andrew McAfee, co-author of the influential book Racing Against the Machine. Andrew argued that while computer technology is enhancing our lives in countless important ways, there is a downside. Information technology has eliminated – and will continue to eliminate – a wide range of jobs, not just clerks and secretaries, but increasingly highly skilled professionals such as writers, translators, doctors, and yes, even drivers. Andrew reminded us of the folly of continually thinking that there are certain things that computers “just can’t do”. This list gets shorter every day. In Andrew’s view, the emergence of IT marks an important economic and societal inflection point where our overall wealth and prosperity continue to increase but are increasingly decoupled from individual wages and employment.