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About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

In the mid-1990s, productivity growth accelerated sharply in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we identify several other industry-level changes that have occurred during the same time and argue that they are consistent with an increased use of information technology (IT). We use case studies to illustrate how IT has enabled firms to more rapidly replicate improved business processes throughout an organization, thereby not only increasing productivity but also market share and market value. We then empirically document a substantial increase in turbulence starting in the 1990s, as measured by the average intra-industry rank change in sales, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), and other metrics. In particular, we find that IT-intensive industries account for most of this increase in turbulence, especially after 1995. In addition, we find that IT-intensive industries became more concentrated than non IT-intensive industries after 1995, reversing the previous trend. The combination of increased turbulence and concentration, especially among IT-intensive industries, is consistent with recent theories of hypercompetition as well as Schumpeterian creative destruction. We conclude that the improved ability of firms to replicate business innovations has changed the nature of business competition.

More innovation is the remedy of the last resort that will save Europe's economic position and welfare. At least, that's what they say. As a result, European corporations are frantically looking for ways to improve the productivity of their knowledge workers, assuming this will increase their innovation ability. Are they looking in the right direction?

The creation of knowledge, products, and services by online communities of companies and consumers is still in its earliest stages. Who knows where it will lead?

The disconnectedness of people and information in today's enterprises is often the unfortunate by-product of a relentless drive for more growth, expansion, cost reduction and unnecessary control. However, disconnectedness as such is not a bad thing. Moreover, future enterprises should be intentionally designed for disconnectedness.

In the current economic reality of margin erosion and rapid commoditisation of products and services, innovation is often seen as the last competitive differentiator. As a result, organisations are desperately looking for ways to improve their -ability to innovate-. Over the past years, some common thinking and sound practices have emerged that focus on a number of key requirements to enable the innovative enterprise. One of these requirements is the development of a working environment that facilitates and stimulates innovation. However, is this thinking radical enough or do we have to go one step further and question the very nature of the organisation itself?

Many questioning about enterprise 2.0 these last weeks. How to make it work, how help companies to understand it, how to calculate the ROI ? So many questions that, at the end, can be summed up in only one : undestranding how these new logics can integrate into the existing and add to it. Without that, it's obvious that either companies don't dare either they will dare with overcautiousness and won'tbe able to get the most from their initiative, either will dare in a bad way and things will be counter-productives.

Internal collaboration is almost universally viewed as good for an organization. Leaders routinely challenge employees to tear down silos, transcend boundaries, and work together in cross-unit teams. And although such initiatives often meet with resistance because they place an extra burden on individuals, the potential benefits of collaboration are significant: innovative cross-unit product development, increased sales through cross-selling, the transfer of best practices that reduce costs.

Over the last year, I've been doing a lot of research on how organizations will need to evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century. The central premise of this work is that new technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration - the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups.