Innovation Roles for Managers

In his book “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” Bill Gates summarises the same idea in a very practical but challenging way: “In three years every product we make will be obsolete. The only question is whether we’ll make them obsolete or if someone else will.”

In the commercial field, after a massive rethink of the business it was in, IBM has moved from almost 90 years as a manufacturer of computers to being essentially a management consultancy in a decade. And in the charity world, organisations like LEPRA — originally set up almost 80 years ago to tackle leprosy — now have moved on to deal with other illnesses such as HIV and tuberculosis.