Harvard Business Review on Top Ideas for 2007

The Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Ideas for 2007. It's their annual survey of 20 emerging ideas around how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why accountability is so important.

A Recap of the Top Ten:

1. The Accidental Influentials - Duncan J. Watts

In reference to The Tipping Point, he says this isn’t actually how ideas spread. It’s better to focus on getting enough plain, ordinary people to sign on.

2. Entrepreneurial Japan - Yoshito Hori

An entrepreneurial Japan—no longer an oxymoron—may ultimately overshadow the much touted start-up cultures of China and India.

3. Brand Magic: Harry Potter Marketing - Frédéric Dalsace, Coralie Damay, and David Dubois

Companies should consider creating brands that mature with their customers.

4. Algorithms in the Attic - Michael Schrage

Just as big firms need the keen eye of an intellectual property curator to appreciate the value of old patents and know-how, they will need savvy mathematicians to resurrect long-forgotten equations that, because of advancing technology, can finally be applied to business.

5. The Leader from Hope - Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry

If you are an executive trying to lead an organization through change, know that hope can be a potent force in your favor. And it’s yours to give.

6. An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation - Eric von Hippel

Most countries, developing and developed alike, view innovation as a vital input to their economic growth and spend varying portions of their national budgets to support it in companies and research labs, for the ultimate benefit of essentially passive consumers. Denmark is taking a different tack: It’s making “user-centered innovation” a national priority.

7. Living with Continuous Partial Attention - Linda Stone

“Continuous partial attention”—distinct from multitasking—is an adaptive behavior that presumably allows us to keep pace with the never-ending bandwidth technology offers. Now there are signs of a backlash against the tyranny of tantalizing choices.

8. Borrowing from the PE Playbook - Michael C. Mankins

If companies are to avoid repeating the disappointments of previous M&A waves, they will have to take a few leaves from the acquisition playbook of private equity firms.

9. When to Sleep on It - Ap Dijksterhuis

Go on a holiday and let your unconscious mind digest the information for a day or two. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.

10. Here Comes XBRL - Robert G. Eccles, Liv Watson, and Mike Willis

A new software standard for financial and business reporting, soon to be adopted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, will make it dramatically easier to generate, validate, aggregate, and analyze business and financial information—which in turn will improve the quality of the information companies use to make decisions.