Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2006), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 34 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2006.26134daa.001

Editor’s letter

This year the IBM 2006 CEO study, featured in this issue, focuses on innovation. The IBM team interviewed 765 CEOs, business executives and public sector leaders from around the world and found that two out of every three CEOs expect fundamental changes for their organizations over the next two years. The key findings were:

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  Business model innovation matters. Competitive pressures have pushed business model innovation much higher than expected on CEOs’ priority lists. But its importance does not negate the need to focus on innovation in products, services and markets, and operations.

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  External collaboration is indispensable. CEOs stressed the overwhelming importance of collaborative innovation – particularly beyond company walls. Business partners and customers were cited as top sources of innovative ideas, while research and development (R&D) fell much lower in the list. However, CEOs also admitted that their organizations are not collaborating nearly enough.

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  Innovation requires orchestration from the top. CEOs acknowledged their primary responsibility for fostering innovation. But to actually orchestrate it, CEOs need to create a more team-based environment, reward individual innovators and better integrate business and technology.

The study provides strong empirical support for our decision several years ago to make innovation a central topic in Strategy & Leadership. During this time we have published three special issues on innovation. The first (Vol. 33, No. 1, January 2005) offered a set of articles on how to improve innovation effectiveness and efficiency by some of the world’s foremost authorities – and we raised a few eyebrows by including an article by a knowledgeable contrarian who warned that all the gurus’ proposals would not solve the problem. In the next special issue we visited the thorny topic of disruptive innovation (Vol. 33, No. 3, May 2005) and looked at successful examples. And in the third issue we asked Clayton Christensen to explain how to make disruptive innovation work (Vol. 33, No. 4, July 2005).

Because we have published so many articles and columns on innovation in recent issues, as a service to readers we have prepared a selected reading list (see table of contents). Recently all of the articles in the first special issue have become available as an e-book (A Special Report on Innovation) that is currently on sale at Amazon.com (http://strategy-forum.blogspot.com/).

At Strategy & Leadership we are excited about innovation – both the topic and the process.

Robert M. RandallEditor