“Flexible access to people and resources can be enormously powerful in a world driven by changes that, more often than not, lead us in unanticipated directions…we need to become more adept at ‘capability leverage’ – finding and accessing complementary capabilities, wherever they reside in the world, to deliver more value.” - From “The Power of Pull” by J Hagel, J S Brown, L Davidson Businesses, in particular in the Western world, are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work. A study by The Work Foundation has estimated that we have a 30-30-40 workforce - 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content. Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work

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My Stanford colleague Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao and I have been leading an executive program at Stanford every November for the past four years that is called Customer-focused Innovation. In the mornings, we discuss the theory and practice of innovation with the executives. In the afternoon's, Perry Klebhan from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (which everyone calls the Stanford d.school) leads the group as they go out into the world to try to tackle read world problems -- such as improving the experience of visiting a gas station or buying a car. For this program, Huggy and I put together a list of 21 evidence-based ideas about how great bosses lead innovation. We would love to hear your ideas about ways great bosses spark innovation as well a concerns -- and extensions -- related to these ideas: 1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

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