If the innovation war is just beginning, then you need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside.

The old way of succeeding in business was to hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people you could afford and then direct them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition.

But the battlefield of business success is changing. Future business success will be built upon the ability to:

1. Utilize expert communities.
2. Identify and gather technology trend information, customer insights and local social mutations from around the globe.
3. Mobilize the organization in organic ways to utilize resources and information often beyond its control.
4. Still organize and execute production and marketing predictably and efficiently in the middle of all this complexity.

At the same time, market leaders will be increasingly determined not by their ability to outmaneuver the competition in a known market, but by their ability to identify and solve for the key unknowns in markets that will continue to become more global and less defined. Future market leaders will be those organizations that build superior global sensing networks and do a better job at making sense of the inputs from these networks to select the optimal actionable insights to drive innovation.

By this point, hopefully you are asking yourself two questions:

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