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"The force driving the most radical change in organizations today is knowledge gained and shared through social media, the great amplifier of our time. Businesses can't hide from the expectations of customers and employees (the iPhone 5). Governments can't hide from the expectations of citizens (the Arab Spring). And trainers can't hide from the expectations of learners. A counterpart to information exchange through social media is the ability to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data about customers, partners, markets, and other quantifiables. Big Data, as it is called, allows companies to respond rapidly and with relevance to their constituents, and leaves them few excuses when they don't."

"At Reebok, the cushioning in a best-selling basketball shoe reflects technology borrowed from intravenous fluid bags. Semiconductor firm Qualcomm's revolutionary color display technology is rooted in the microstructures of the Morpho butterfly's wings. And at IDEO, developers designed a leak-proof water bottle using the technology from a shampoo bottle top. These examples show how so-called "peripheral" knowledge - that is, ideas from domains that are seemingly irrelevant to a given task - can influence breakthrough innovation. "The central idea of peripheral knowledge really resonates," says Wharton management professor Martine Haas. After all, who can't think of examples when ideas that seemed to bear almost no relation to a given problem paid off in some unexpected way? By bringing peripheral knowledge to core tasks, it is well known that work groups can recombine ideas in novel and useful ways. But the problem, Haas notes, is primarily one of attention: How do you get workers focused on a particular task to notice - and make use of - seemingly irrelevant information?"

The world today is filled with information. This proliferation makes it quite overwhelming to make good sense of "big data" that is continuously flowing in from a variety of new sources. In the past, the way to get things done was to keep data close, using small teams to sift through it. But now, people are used to having information at their fingertips. They're accustomed to sifting through it and coming up with new solutions, getting insights in unexpected ways.

With the current pace of change, organizations will have to be prepared for the unexpected. They will have to provide flexible access to people and information resources to serve unanticipated information needs whenever and wherever they occur. However, traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers in this respect.