We live in a world where consumers have a plethora of choices and can switch loyalties if they are dissatisfied with a particular product or service. And the business environment is extremely competitive and dynamic. The only way to survive and grow is to innovate and keep innovating. For many, innovation (sometimes known as business creativity), is about using IT and automation to grow the business, increase efficiencies, increase revenue, save costs or energy. It’s also about creating new value propositions and creating trend setting products or services to address customer demand.

In his book The New Age of Innovation, management guru CK Prahalad (and his co-author MS Krishnan), write about the different pillars of innovation; the first is co-creation of value and personalization of the experience. They say: while you may give your customers the devices or platform or tools (by way of a product or service) this must be created with their close involvement. And you must offer the ability to customize the product to their specific needs.

Prahalad and Krishnan call this phenomenon N=1. Create a unique experience for every consumer.

And then there is yet another pillar of innovation they designate R=G, meaning the resources needed for products, services or competencies are sourced globally. No one company in the world can manufacture all the components required to make a product. These are sourced from organizations around the world and delivered through global supply chains. While a brand may be associated with a particular company in a particular country, the product is essentially multi-national or multi-institutional.

But the co-creation of value and experiences as indicated above is not just the domain of high net worth individuals. It is also applicable to those at the bottom of the pyramid, writes Prahalad in another book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, where he talks about another kind of innovation---one that drives “inclusive capitalism”.

I’d like to leave you with one example.

An NGO called Social Education and Development Society (SEDS) built a Census Information Management System (CIMS) without hiring programmers and writing code. Instead, it used a PaaS platform offered by WOLF Frameworks to rapidly build applications by just pointing and clicking. SEDS built its CIMS in just 120 hours, at very minimal cost.

It’s not the cost-savings that I want to talk about; it’s the impact on society. CIMS has the potential to transform the lives of 40,000 people living below the poverty line by generating UIDs for them. The application stores and manages data of 250 villages and 980 self-help groups. You can read more about our Silver EDGE award winner SEDS in the October issue of InformationWeek.