Top 10 CK Prahalad Insights – World Innovation Forum

Taking a slightly different approach than other World Innovation Forum bloggers, I’ve distilled 90 minutes with CK Prahalad down into these Top 10 Insights:

1. Companies achieving competitive separation will be focused on ‘next practices’, not best practices
2. Managers must focus some of their attention on volatility and discontinuities, because if not actively managed, discontinuities become disruptions
3. To manage volatility you must address two contradictory requirements:
• Strategic Clarity and Consistency
• Operational Agility and Resilience
4. Avoiding commoditization from now will require the creation of personalized, co-created experiences (possibly using multiple vendors)
5. Only when you try to get rid of variable costs do you realize they are fixed
6. Our new business reality requires systems capable of enormous volatility and scaling up and down rapidly
• How do I create capability of anticipating the future?
• How do I enable real time reconfiguration of resources?
7. Four billion people want to be part of the global marketplace – this will have a profound impact on sustainability
8. The question is not whether I can invest big, it is whether I can learn fast
9. Innovation requires speed and stamina along with clarity of direction
10. Don’t start where you are in determining strategy – you will only get extrapolation from present – and you will only get budget-oriented approaches
• Position yourself in 2015 or 2020 and then fold the future in
• Strategy is about folding the future in, not about extrapolating
• You imagine the future and then you determine the short steps inbetween to get there

Finally, I’d like to end with a quote from CK Prahalad’s mother:

“Never accept silence as agreement because you’ll regret it later.”

What do you think?

Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter)