3rd Annual Top 5 HBR Breakthrough ideas

... in which we winnow down Harvard Business Review's yearly list of 20 breakthrough ideas to a manageable 5.

1. The Business of Biomimicry, by Janine M. Benyus and Gunter A.M. Pauli. Many of the most important new innovations we'll see in 2009 and beyond will involve borrowing and inspiration from nature's processes.

2. Institutional Memory Goes Digital, by Gurdeep Singh Pall and Rita Gunther McGrath. What will happen when every word, gesture, etc., of business interactions are recorded and stored? [I'm most interested in the subset of this involving intentionally captured and signified narrative information for knowledge sharing. The Mistake Bank is an early stab at this idea.]

3. How Social Networks Work Best, by Alex Pentland. New research shows that collaborations work best when social networks are used differently for discovery and integration activities.

4. The Ikea Factor, by Michael I. Norton. Having a hand in building a product leads to a stronger emotional connection with it. [Does this say anything about self-service gas stations and supermarkets?]

5. Forget Citibank, Borrow From Bob, by John Sviokla, and Consumer Safety For Consumer Credit, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi. It's inevitable that the fallout of our financial crisis will be a radical restructuring and reinvention of the financial industry. And it's about time.


Related posts:
2008 Top 5 Breakthrough Ideas
2007 Top 5 Breakthrough Ideas