Puny Humans Outlasted Saber-Toothed Tigers, Woolly Mammoths, and Giant Sloths (Perhaps Even Ate Them Into Extinction). What’s That Got To Do With Management Innovation?

Chapel Hill, NC, April 09, 2006 --(PR.com)-- “Everything!” according to Baba Prasad, President and CEO of Corporate Excellence Consulting, Inc. (CEC) a new innovation strategy consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, NC. Dr. Prasad, who has a Ph.D. from the Wharton School of Business and was a faculty in several business schools before founding CEC, says, “Even though humans were less powerful and had less resources than these giant beasts, they out-survived better-endowed animals through innovation: They drew strength from collectivity, they devised weapons, they discovered fire.” And the source of such innovation? Intelligence. According to Baba Prasad, this holds important lessons for organizations today as they fashion their innovation strategy.

In a radically new approach to innovation management, drawing on more than seven years of research, CEC has developed a proprietary framework that brings together theories from diverse fields such as human intelligence, organization science, defense capability assessment, complexity theory, operations management, and cultural anthropology.

What advice does CEC have for companies about innovation management? To make innovation a way of life in the organization, make deliberate connections between human intelligence, organizational intelligence, and innovation. As the CEC framework shows, when individual employees can naturally incorporate “an innovative mind-set” into daily routines in the work-place, then innovation becomes organic to the company.

Second, do not make “innovation” a blanket term. Recent theories of intelligence posit that individuals have multiple intelligences. “What we found,” says Dr. Prasad, “is that individuals and firms can be innovative in different ways, and the organization’s challenge is to guide the development of innovative capacities so that they match the individual’s function, the firm’s ethos, and the industry’s innovative ecosystem.” When innovation is localized and in harmony throughout the organization it yields extraordinary returns.

A third piece of advice for organizations comes in the metrics of innovation. According to Dr. Prasad, “Most metrics allow organizations to examine their innovation performance in past periods. One of our achievements has been to measure past innovation performance but to also help organizations assess at the same time, the firm’s capacity or potential for innovation. Once we determine that, we can guide the firm in the most effective ways to develop and deploy appropriate innovative capacity at every level of the organization.”
Finally, Dr. Prasad advises organizations to expand the typical notion of innovation. “When you conceptualize innovation as only ‘radical breakthrough’, continual innovation is virtually impossible,” says Baba Prasad. “It is like saying that in an organization planning an innovation-based strategy, every heartbeat is a shock administered by a defibrillator.” CEC instead views innovation as both radical breakthrough as well as “collective incremental innovation”, which it defines as “dramatic improvement caused by small changes made by many individuals continually.”

Companies seem to like this. Within a week of the formation of CEC, Dr. Prasad has been invited to deliver a Leadership Series lecture at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. India (NYSE: "SAY"), and to conduct a workshop for the Carolina branch of The INDUS Entrepreneurs.
For more details or interviews contact: Baba Prasad
Telephone: 919-338-8164
bprasad@corpexcellence.com
http://www.corpexcellence.com

Corporate Excellence Consulting
1308 LeClair Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27517
Phone: 919-338-8164.
Fax: 919-338-2666

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About Dr. Baba Prasad
President and CEO, Corporate Excellence Consulting, Inc.

After finishing his Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, Baba Prasad taught in the business schools at Purdue University, University of Minnesota, and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Prasad earned his BSEE from the Indian Institute of Science, his Master's in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from the University of Hyderabad, and his second Master's in Computer Science from Kansas State University. Since 1997, he has also been a Sloan Research Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. In his teaching career, he was rated MBA faculty of distinction at Purdue's Krannert School, and consistently received high ratings at the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota.

Innovation Strategy based on Organizational Intelligence
Dr. Prasad founded Corporate Excellence Consulting on his conviction that organizations become excellent and sustain that excellence only when innovation is organic to the firm. For many years at Wharton and elsewhere, Dr. Prasad has researched and analyzed methods by which innovation can be organically and comprehensively embedded into firms. Drawing on a combination of theories from psychology, operations management, information systems, and cultural anthropology, he has developed strategies and methodologies based on organizational intelligence to create and sustain innovation. The result is a constantly self-renewing dynamism that is embedded within the life processes of the firm--the key to sustained corporate excellence.

Dr. Prasad analyzes corporate strategy and industry trends drawing on two decades of association with information technology in various capacities: from being a hardware engineer and an entrepreneur developing and marketing artificial intelligence products to being a technology management consultant on Wall Street and an exciting lateral thinker on corporate strategy and innovation.

IT-Based Strategy
As a Sloan Research Fellow at Wharton, Prasad studied technology strategy in more than 115 retail banks across the US, and obtained results that overturned the opinion that the more a firm invests in information technology, the better its performance. He found to the contrary that in the 1993-95 time period, banks had over-invested in IT hardware and software, and that in order for IT to help them become more productive, banks would have to invest more in IS people and IS training. This research became the centerpiece article of US Banker (August 1997), and was also presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to an audience that included luminaries like Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Word-of-Mouth and Online Markets
Prasad has been a pioneer in studying the influence of word-of-mouth in e-business environments and has developed product adoption and pricing models for online services (like banking and content provision) incorporating the effects of word-of-mouth and expert opinion. In 1997, he modeled customer-behavior in online-banking services and presented prescient insights about service adoption and pricing of Internet-banking services, insights that have come to be vindicated over the last five years by firm pricing behavior and by the common marketing term "buzz marketing".

Technology Management on Wall Street
As a technology consultant for Wall Street firms, Prasad analyzed investment-banking operations and determined strategic software products and applications to develop or acquire.

Knowledge Management
Prasad has recently developed a model to view knowledge assets as essentially risky assets with 10 facets of risk making portfolio methods applicable to Knowledge Management.

INTERVIEW TOPIC IDEAS

1. Why is conceptualizing innovation along the lines of organizational intelligence important?
Human life has shown through the ages that the natural model for innovation is intelligence. But until now, organizational innovation has not been conceptualized in terms of organizational intelligence. Once we conceptualize innovation along a framework of organizational intelligence, it opens up new vistas for us. Such as:
• The implications of recent advances in theories of human intelligence for managing innovation strategy
• The history of intelligence tests and assessments and their bearing on assessing innovative capacity (till now thought to be very difficult to measure)
• The notion of multiple innovative capacities and which one is better for which type of task, which type of firm, which type of industry?

2. Three levels of organizational intelligence
Definition of organizational intelligence. It is easy to understand the intelligence of individual humans. How do we extrapolate from here to organizational intelligence.
• There are 3 levels of extrapolation.
• Most companies which use aptitude tests like Google’s GLAT only during recruiting are at level 1
• How can an organization move from level 1 to level 3 so that it can fully leverage its innovative capacity?

3. Four advantages that an organization can derive from the management of innovation strategy based on organizational intelligence
When a firm builds its innovation strategy on the basis of organizational intelligence, it immediately solves some of the problems that affect the efficient and effective implementation of innovation strategy.
• How to make innovation a continual activity across the firm?
• How to focus innovation as appropriate to function, firm, and industry?
• How to get employee buy-in?
• How to stop innovation strategy from becoming a short-lived fad?

4. Post-facto and Pre-assessments of innovation
Metrics of innovation typically afford 20/20 hindsight. They usually measure the firm’s innovation based on past performance (e.g. how many new products did we bring out last year)? Strategic assessments need metrics that can predict the performance of the firm.
• How do intelligence tests go beyond IQ? What can they offer to measure innovation capacity?
• How can assessment of innovative capacity extend beyond individuals to include organizational processes, principles, systems, or cultures?
• Can this assessment be made dynamic and continual instead of sporadic and snapshot?

SUGGESTED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

• What is the connection between intelligence and innovation?
• What is the relationship between individual intelligence and organizational intelligence?
• What are the advantages of thinking of innovation along the lines of organizational intelligence?
• How do advances in theory of intelligence affect the concept of organizational intelligence?
• Can you elaborate on your claim that innovative capacities are of different types?
• What are the types of innovative capacity?
• Is one type of innovative capacity better for a firm than another?
• How would a model of innovation based on organizational intelligence differ from other approaches to innovation management?
• What is the usual conception of innovation?
• How do you envisage innovation differently?
• You use a term “collective incremental innovation.” What does that mean?
• How would one measure innovation typically?
• What new metrics does your framework offer for measuring innovation?
• How much would it cost an organization to implement your framework?