C.K. Prahalad, Global Social Networks and Innovation

I’m racing through a copy of “Bottom of the Pyramid” guru, CK Prahalad’s new tome, the hefty book: The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value through Global Networks. CK’s a really smart thinker and while much of what he’s saying can seem obvious, we all know that what might seem obvious in theory can be devilishly difficult to apply in practice. So the examples and the stories and the hammering home of the lessons to be learned and practices and processes to be applied should make this book prescribed reading. The two lynchpins of his argument are:

"Firms have to learn to focus on one consumer and his/her experience at a time, even if they serve 100 million consumers… No firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time. The focus is on access to resources, not ownership of resources."

Professor and author C. K. Prahalad explores how G.E. took a local innovation, designed to help those in the poorest and most remote villages in India and China, and turned it into a global, game-changing product. In his book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he argues that this is no anomaly, but rather the future of innovation.