Thinkers 50 Innovation: Breakthrough Thinking to Take Your Business to the Next Level

CHAPTER3

Co-creating the Future

Innovation is still often associated with the lone creator working late at night in search of inspiration. If only innovation were that simple. Contemporary innovation is a team sport. Among the leading intellectual players in establishing this was Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, better known as C. K. Prahalad. Prahalad (1941–2010) was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. In the 2007 and 2009 Thinkers50, he was ranked number one—a position he retained until his untimely death in 2010.

Prahalad introduced the term core competencies to the management lexicon, and his bestselling book Competing for the Future, ...