8

The modern corporatist system propagated itself unattended and almost without check, with the exception of the labor movements of the late 1800’s and 1900’s, which put a different but equally destructive system in play – that labor, like capital, is a value unto itself, regardless of how it is employed or the value it produces. Then things seemed to be turning around in the early 1980’s, when the advent of access to relatively cheap computing meant that an increasing number of companies competed in the realm of applying knowledge. Since knowledge was the unique province of the human being (as opposed to mechanical leverage, which was the domain of machines), people started to become more important than equipment. Then we moved to the place where knowledge was cheap and easy because of the interconnected capabilities of cheap computing resources. Competitive advantage started to go to companies that could commercialize creativity (the most common meaning behind the term “innovation”). As an increasing number of companies compete based on their ability to take human being’s ideas and turn them into consumable products and services, and as the infrastructure for commercializing those ideas becomes ever cheaper to access, utilize and extend, creativity becomes an ever increasing component of competitive advantage. In addition, as the excellent slideshow below demonstrates (a huge thank you to Gautam Ghosh for originally exhibiting this slideshow, whose wonderful blog covers many aspects of innovation can be found here), innovation is increasingly seen as part of process excellence and cost cutting.