Management of Innovation in New Millennium

PREFACE

The last chaotic years of the 20th Century now are seeing a largely unanticipated and little appreciated confluence of three independent phenomena, each of significant magnitude. Combined, they are causing unprecedented degrees of economic and social turbulence that will continually compound the difficulties of all forms of management. New skills, concepts and disciplines, known but not widely practiced, will be required to cope with the discontinuities that are resulting.

One of these phenomena involves an explosive advance of technology, which already has collapsed product and life cycles form decades to just a few years in many industries, obsoleting equipment and facilities long before their useful lives can be realized. A second involves the coincidental end of a fourth 50 year economic cycle, the last stages of which always have been marked by a worldwide glut of capacity in many commodity businesses. This excess capacity now must be significantly cut back, and the businesses involved must be downsized and restructured--a process well advanced in the U.S. but not in other countries. Serious unemployment and social unrest likely will result.

The third phenomena has resulted primarily from extraordinary advances in communications, which recently have tied the world together, for the first time--in real time. Thousands of cross border alliances now are forming, which are bypassing regulatory, language, and cultural barriers, and also are rapidly eroding the financial and economic sovereignty of the Nation State system. In fact, this period now is seeing the last stages of a 6th great 500 year Epoch, now going to 1000 B.C. An "older order," the Nation State system, is giving way to a "new order," a Global Village without boarders. The last century of each of these 500 year Epochs has always involved massive trauma and turbulence--wars, the collapse of empires, and economic restructuring. This 20th century has already seen unparalleled turbulence, which may escalate further.

• Organizations caught in the down draft of a collapsing Order, may not survive, but that those that catch the rising tide of a new Order can flourish.

Unfortunately, the combined effect of these three phenomena (each of historic significance in its own right), have not only exponentially increased the level of global turbulence, but also have collapsed the time frame for adjustment to an unprecedented degree.