Chapter 12. Concluding Thoughts and Actions for “Monday” Morning...
We started this book by outlining the innovation crisis that many companies are facing as a result of declining R&D productivity on the one hand and the quickening pace of competition on the other hand. Companies such as Dell, Kraft, and Merck are grappling with the innovation crisis. While these high-profile companies have gotten a lot of press because they have fallen on hard times, the innovation crisis is not limited to a few large companies. Indeed, companies large and small across a wide range of industries are facing similar problems.
Is your company facing an innovation crisis? Ask yourself the following questions:
• Have you seen a steep increase in new product development costs in recent years?
• Are you seeing a decline in the productivity of R&D dollars spent by your company?
• Are you faced with shrinking life cycles for your products?
• Are your products getting commoditized faster than in the past?
• Is your commercialization cost for new offerings at least twice that of the best-in-class competitor?
• Is your concept-to-commercialization time at least twice as long as the best-in-class competitor?
• Are you faced with unfamiliar competitors from China and India who have significantly lower development and manufacturing costs than your company?
• Are you finding it more difficult and more expensive to hire high-quality engineering and scientific talent?
• Are you finding that, even with a bigger number of projects in your pipeline, you are not able to deliver enough “hit” products to the market?
• Overall, are you finding that your innovation process is not up to meeting investor growth expectations?
If you answered “yes” to a majority of these questions, welcome to the innovation crisis. You are joining the ranks of companies like Motorola, which has seen the price of its wildly popular Razr phone plummet from a high of $500 when the phone was introduced in November 2004, to $200 in mid-2005, and finally to less than $50 by the end of 2006. In the last quarter of 2006, Motorola sold 48% more Razr phones than in the year-ago quarter, but its revenues still fell. To stem the erosion, Motorola introduced a follow-up product called the Krzr, but this was seen as an incremental product that got commoditized even faster. The result—the very future of Motorola is at stake. Remember the Red Queen effect that we described in Chapter 1, “The Power of Network-Centricity”? This is an example of the Red Queen effect in action.
Or perhaps your company is like General Motors, which offers the lowest-priced car in the United States, the $10,560 Chevrolet Aveo, while an Indian auto company, Tata Motors, is working on a car that it aims to sell for $2,500. The “people’s car,” being developed with the ingenuity of Indian automotive engineers and the dramatically lower development costs in India, might rival the Ford Model T or the Volkswagen Beetle as a breakthrough in affordability and be responsible for bringing millions of new customers into the automobile market.1 Although the tiny and underpowered Tata car might never be sold in the United States, Tata Motors will certainly learn valuable lessons it can put to use in creating cheaper cars targeted at Western markets. This is the face of global competition.
The multiple dimensions of the innovation crisis—cost, time to market, quality, creativity—combine to create a multiplier effect that can jeopardize your company’s future. To secure its future, you need to look outside your firm for ideas, technologies, and products. You need to harness the power of the Global Brain to improve the reach, increase the speed, and reduce the cost of your innovation process. You need to choose and implement network-centric innovation models and roles that are most appropriate for your company.
The core argument of our book is that tapping into the Global Brain is no longer a matter of choice. It is more a question of how, rather than whether, a company should pursue a network-centric innovation strategy. This sense of crisis is what has stoked executive management’s interest in network-centric innovation initiatives, evidenced in the urgent call for action issued by several high-profile CEOs.
The CEO is who should begin the journey towards network-centric innovation, so it is fitting that we conclude the book by focusing in this chapter on the role of the CEO in communicating a sense of crisis to the organization and evangelizing or building the faith in network-centric innovation initiatives.
We take a step back by reflecting on some of the core themes and practices that underlie network-centric innovation—themes and practices that reflect the insights and the wisdom distilled from experiences of the firms and the managers that we have interacted with while researching this book. Some of these experiences were successes whereas others ended in failure. As such, they capture practices that can significantly advance a company’s innovation initiative as well as those that might remove potential barriers to success.
Evangelize and “Build the Faith”
A theme that has surfaced repeatedly in our discussions with managers across companies and industries is the central role of the CEO in “building the faith” in the organization about looking outside the organization for ideas and partnering with external actors and communities to further the firm’s innovation agenda.
In many large companies, this has taken the form of the CEO setting out explicit goals related to network-centric innovation. Companies such as DuPont, P&G, Staples, and IBM come to mind. In some of these cases, the CEO’s goals have gotten wider visibility in the business community.
However, as the phrase build the faith indicates, the CEO’s role goes beyond just setting goals related to how much innovation should be sourced from outside or how much new revenue should be generated from network-centric innovation initiatives. CEOs need to champion a new set of beliefs that might initially be perceived as heretical and generate stiff internal resistance. Often, internal resistance comes from senior managers—people who have the power and the motive to sabotage the initiatives.
Overcoming this internal resistance is what Sam Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, had to do when its “Global Innovation Outlook” (GIO) was conceived in early 2004. The idea that IBM would open its technology and business forecasting processes to a broad set of clients and partners seemed heretical and attracted plenty of resistance when it was first proposed. David Yaun, the vice president for corporate communication at IBM, recalls initial response ranged from comments that ridiculed the value of the idea to suggestions that the team behind the GIO would damage IBM’s credibility and brand image.2 Some managers felt that “We already do this,” while others opined, “What you’re doing is very dangerous. I won’t stand for it.” One executive “forbid” the team from contacting “my clients” and a senior researcher was even more caustic, noting that, “My job is to prevent you from embarrassing our chairman.”
Palmisano played a crucial role in “pushing” the organization to accept these initiatives. He strongly endorsed the initiative and gave the GIO team their marching orders. He pushed them to slash the proposed time for implementing the GIO initiative from 18 months to 5 months, and suggested to the team that, if at any time they felt comfortable with their progress, then their approach was wrong—in other words, they would be playing it too safe. To overcome internal objections, he steered away from a mandate. Instead, he gave the team flexible funding, freedom to experiment (and fail), and most important, constituted an executive sponsor board (including some of the original skeptics) to steer the initiative—in effect, giving them a personal stake in its success. This approach signaled the seriousness of the initiative in the chairman’s perspective, and went a long way in shaping the thinking of the organization in the right direction. The IBM experience illustrates how a CEO has to be the “sword and the shield” for opening up the company’s innovation efforts and shifting to a more network-centric approach.
Another dimension of building the faith is providing the right perspective for the organization to view external innovation opportunities. The evangelization efforts initiated by the CEO’s office should also incorporate a broad outline of questions that managers need to consider in embarking on network-centric innovation initiatives. For example, what are the broad parameters on which the organization is committing itself to explore network-centric innovation initiatives? Are there certain models of network-centric innovation that the organization will not pursue? Is the organization going to partner with non-traditional partners (for example, non-profit organizations, individual inventors, and so on)? How much control and influence is the organization willing to “let go” of in these initiatives? Will this approach be broadly applied or largely limited to those business divisions in new or emerging markets?
Addressing such questions early helps managers evaluate the extent of organizational commitment on network-centric innovation as well as understand the “hows” and the “whys” that underlie such commitment. As one manager put it to us, “Goals are important. However, we have lot of ‘goals’ floating around in our company at any one time. So one more set of goals is not going to be very useful. What we need is a framework or a mental model for us to approach this issue uniformly. And I believe that it is the job of the CEO to provide this framework.”
In short, public announcements of organizational aspirations regarding network-centric innovation is only one part (perhaps the more visible part), but the more important task for the CEO is to set out the broad approach in a way that really helps build the faith of the organization in external innovation initiatives.
“Engage” the Entire Organization
As we have seen in exploring the four models of network-centric innovation, the opportunities for leading or participating in network-centric innovation can emanate from different types of external entities—individual inventors, innovation capitalists and other such intermediaries, customers, technology partners, suppliers, non-profit organizations, and so on. Further, these different external entities typically come into contact with different parts of the organization—marketing, R&D, business development, procurement and so on. As such, it is important to “engage” the entire organization in the effort to identify and evaluate the different network-centric innovation opportunities, even if there is one unit assigned with the responsibility to coordinate the different initiatives.
The first step in engaging the organization is to get the message about network-centric innovation out to every corner of the organization. Although this step can partly be accomplished by the CEO’s evangelization efforts, these efforts need to be supplemented with a more extensive information campaign. For example, in the case of 3M, this job has largely been the responsibility of its corporate R&D unit. As Robert Finnochiaro, 3M’s corporate technical director told us, “Our task in the last couple of years has been to complement the work done by our senior management and to get everybody in the organization, particularly all of our business divisions and their local R&D units, on the same page.”
Another approach to drive broader engagement is to deploy the network-based strategy inside your organization first. When IBM sought to promote its Innovation Jam initiative—an “online brainstorming session” to mine new and innovative business ideas and opportunities—it conducted the first Jam experiment in 2003 by involving its own employees. The objective of this “Values Jam” was to identify the core values of the organization and to develop a consensus around the core values. After the first Jam was deemed successful, IBM refocused the Jam on innovation, calling it the Innovation Jam, and expanded the participants to include its ecosystem partners—customers, suppliers, and so on. The objective of the second Innovation Jam, conducted in 2006, was to identify emerging technology trends in the key markets that mattered to IBM. In the next round, IBM expanded the boundaries further by focusing the Innovation Jam on specific industries and audiences. For example, in March 2007, it conducted an Innovation Jam focused on the automotive industry called the Automotive Supplier Jam. This initiative brought together individuals from supplier organizations as well as from OEMs, government, academia, industry associations, and others affiliated with the automotive supplier segment. More than 2,000 people from 150 organizations and 17 countries participated in the Automotive Supplier Jam on topics like program lifecycle profitability, creating an innovative culture, and embracing green technologies.
IBM’s approach is reminiscent of the old adage, “Charity begins at home.” In broadening the engagement with network-centric innovation, starting from the inside is best by “opening up inside” before “opening up outside.” This inside-to-outside approach allows the diffusion of the values associated with network-centric innovation broadly and deeply across the organization.
Getting buy-in from the entire organization requires not just getting the message out, but more importantly, building the “capability” for the managers in the different functional units and/or business divisions to recognize promising network-centric innovation opportunities and to “connect with” and share information with other organizational units that can act on those opportunities. If such a capability is created, then wherever such opportunities might arise—whether it is the marketing function or the global procurement unit—the organization will be able to identify, evaluate, and pursue them without skipping a beat. Ideally, every manager and every function should become a “personal portal” into the external world, constantly scanning the environment for external innovation opportunities.
Thus, in “building the faith” and “engaging the organization,” the key question to ask is, “Is your organization wired for network-centric innovation?”
Experiment! Experiment!—Around Value Creation and Value Capture
An important theme that we have gleaned from our discussions with managers is the need for continued experimentation—around value creation as well as value capture. As we suggested in our examination of the network-centric innovation landscape, several parts of this terrain are still not well populated and many of the innovation roles are new and ill-defined. This being the case, you are not likely to find explicit guidelines on how to pursue network-centric innovation initiatives. Therefore, you have to be willing to experiment and to make mistakes.
Consider the Creative Bazaar model. Companies such as P&G, Dial, and Staples have all experimented with different approaches to connect with individual inventors. For example, whereas Dial launched a company-hosted competition to directly connect with individual inventors, Staples used an intermediary to do the same, and P&G opted to deal mostly with value-adding innovation capitalists. In each case, the companies didn’t have a clear understanding of how everything would work out and were essentially experimenting with the different approaches. As their initiatives progressed, they learned what worked and what didn’t and they adapted their strategies appropriately.
In the pharmaceutical industry, companies such as Merck and Pfizer are realizing the importance of experimentation in their innovation models and processes. As we described in Chapter 7, “The Jam Central Model,” alternate modes of drug discovery have led to new contexts for such experimentation for pharma and biotech companies—contexts that involve non-traditional partners (for example, non-profits such as The Synaptic Leap) and innovation outcomes that lack clarity on value appropriation and sharing. Despite the nature of such unpaved roads and the associated uncertainties, pharma companies are forging ahead by pursuing different network-centric innovation initiatives and addressing the issues as and when they come by.
The same experimentation mindset was visible in many of the other companies and industries we studied. In many cases, not only were the approaches not clear to the companies themselves, but they were also facing a number of questions from their network partners, too. For example, when Sun launched its OpenSPARC initiative, it faced a barrage of questions from the community members regarding innovation goals and processes, IP rights management, value capture, and so on. As Dave Weaver of Sun puts it: “To be very frank, we hadn’t thought about many of these issues the members were raising (in the community) and so it was a lot of learning for us—first to understand the issues and then to come up with answers that would be acceptable to all.”
Experimentation does not mean pursuing roles that don’t make business sense for the company. On the other hand, it indicates the willingness to pursue those roles that make good business sense but whose details are not very clear at the outset. It implies the need to keep an open mind regarding the initiative so as to continuously adapt and evolve to get the processes and the governance right.
The key message for senior managers: Promote experimentation and reward reasoned failure!
Look Beyond the Idea—Escaping the Valley of Death!
One issue that came up repeatedly in our discussions with managers is the need to have end-to-end capabilities to really benefit from network-centric innovation.
Much of the excitement about externally focused attention has been focused on getting new ideas to feed the fuzzy front-end of the innovation funnel. But you cannot eat ideas for lunch! Ideas that cannot be converted into commercialized products and services are of little use. When the innovative ideas are brought in from outside (whether from amateur inventors or customers or partners), they need to be shepherded through the development and commercialization process in order for the company to benefit from those ideas. Executives point to the “valley of death” that separates ideation from commercialization, where ideas get “lost in transition” because the commercialization resources aren’t aligned with the ideation and discovery initiatives. We find that this is a common problem when sourcing innovative ideas from the outside, owing to the fact that often no natural home exists in a business unit for externally sourced innovation.
Crossing the “valley of death” requires two things: a set of structured, formal processes that integrate external and internal activities and a committed project champion.3
As we emphasized in Chapter 9, “Deciding Where and How to Play,” preparing the organization for network-centric innovation involves paying close attention to processes for integrating internal and external innovation activities—for example, processes that bridge the gap between ideation and execution. Many of the companies that we studied did not have clearly defined processes to ensure that the product vision developed around the externally sourced idea is communicated well to and acted upon effectively by the people responsible for development and commercialization. Such processes should specify how the project will evolve and become part of the company’s regularly funded development and commercial activities—that is, how the project will attract resources from established budgets, what decision processes and criteria will be used for project approval and evaluation, and so on. As the managers we talked with noted, lack of such process could lead to poor transitioning from ideation to execution, with major implications on the innovation success itself.
Creating clear organizational responsibilities for commercialization of externally sourced innovation in collaboration with business units is also important. Assigning informal champions for each project is one way to go, as companies such as Dial, Unilever, and so on have found. Such “champions” serve as the driving force in getting the project across the valley of death by owning the “business case” associated with the idea, by networking and connecting people across the ideation-execution divide, and negotiating to acquire appropriate organizational resources and capabilities.
Thus, before launching network-centric innovation initiatives, taking a step back to re-examine or re-evaluate your back-end product development processes and capabilities is a good idea. Do you need to revamp them to adapt to the new approaches that you are adopting? Do you need to invest in new back-end capabilities? Do you need to create new organizational roles? And remember, depending on the model of network-centric innovation and the role that your company plays in it, the nature of these back-end processes and capabilities might vary.
Manage the Network “Pushes” and “Pulls”
Organizations embarking on network-centric innovation initiatives have to acknowledge one important factor—dependencies! We talked about this earlier in Chapter 10, “Preparing the Organization.” However, it is worth repeating the important role that dependencies play in such initiatives.
An organization’s ability to manage the “pushes” and the “pulls” experienced in its interactions with the network members can become very important in ensuring long-term success. Managing these network forces might consume significant organizational resources. Decisions and actions undertaken by partners might disrupt or force changes in internal R&D plans. They might create new centers of resistances within different parts of the organization toward network-centric innovation itself. Particularly, if dependencies exist between a firm’s externally oriented projects and its other internal innovation projects.
Such dependencies can exist in the different models of network-centric innovation that we discussed. For example, in the Orchestra model, smaller companies that partner with platform leaders such as Microsoft, Intel, and Salesforce.com often feel pulled in different directions when the market positioning and standards of the complementary technology they possess start diverging from those of the platform as the platform evolves. Similarly, as some of Boeing’s Japanese partners discovered over time, their own internal plans (for example, pursuing long-term plans to be standalone aircraft manufacturers) might at times be in conflict with the decisions made by the larger partner.
In some instances, the larger firm might need to take care of such dependencies. For example, as IBM started collaborating with Open Source Software communities, it soon discovered that what happens in the Open Source arena has important implications on its other products/services. Some of these could be decisions to abandon internal innovation efforts in certain areas—for example, not pursuing the development of proprietary solutions that compete with the Apache HTTP stack. Some of them could be redefining goals and strategies—for example, modifying/adapting developing plans so as to leverage the evolution of the Linux platform.
The key message here is not to lose awareness of the nature of dependencies that your firm will be getting into when deciding to pursue network-centric innovation initiatives. Such awareness can serve as a trigger to reexamine periodically the company’s internal innovation goals and decisions and its participation in the network-centric innovation initiative. This is important to make sure that disruptive forces that originate in external networks do not derail your company’s innovation agenda.
Wear More Than One “Hat”—But, Carefully!
In Chapter 9, we discussed how some of the large companies have started playing more than one role in network-centric innovation. For example, IBM has become both a platform leader (in its Power technology) and an innovation sponsor in some of the Open Source Software communities. Similarly, Sun has started focusing on playing the role of an innovation catalyst in the OpenSPARC initiative, in addition to being the platform leader in its core server business.
When firms wear multiple “hats” in network-centric innovation, they can take a more balanced approach to external innovation activities. For example, a company can take a lead role in certain initiatives and at the same time play a more supportive role in some other initiatives. The diversity of roles can reduce the overall risk involved in externally oriented innovation. It also facilitates the acquisition of knowledge or “learning” from a more diverse set of partners as well as a more diverse set of innovation activities.
However, a multiplicity of roles imposes additional costs for the company. For example, as we discussed in Chapter 9, “Deciding Where and How to Play,” different roles call for different types of resources and capabilities. As companies pursue a portfolio of innovation roles, the diversity of competencies and infrastructure that might need to be established to support those roles will increase. While for many of the large companies such as P&G, DuPont, 3M, and IBM, the resource implications might not be too critical, for smaller companies these issues might be of particular significance.
Thus, the attraction of a “multi-player” strategy has to be tempered with the likely demand for additional organizational resources and capabilities.
Reallocate (Not Decrease) Your Innovation Dollars!
Innovation networks and communities indicate the considerable potential that exists outside of a firm to enhance its rate and quality of innovation. When companies consider this potential, there is a tendency to assume that they can reduce their investment in internal R&D. A key message from companies that have been successful in pursuing network-centric innovation is, reallocate—not decrease—your company’s innovation investments.
In the short term, companies might be able to substitute internal resources with external resources and maintain their innovation agenda with lower levels of R&D investments. But it is not likely to work in the long term. Remember, your ability to derive returns from network-centric innovation is going to depend on the innovation assets and capabilities that you bring to the network. The greater the value of such internal assets, the greater the returns from participating in the network.
Thus, participation in network-centric innovation doesn’t imply making lower investments in the company’s innovation pursuits. However, it might lead to different choices for those investments. For example, some companies might invest more in downstream processes and capabilities whereas others might invest more in upstream capabilities. Reallocation of investment priorities should reflect the role(s) the company has decided to pursue in network-centric innovation.
Decreasing the company’s innovation budget only lowers the overall capability of the company to participate in network-centric innovation and limits its ability to exploit the potential of external networks and communities.
Don’t Forget to Make Money
The flip side of the efforts to encourage and build the organization’s faith in network-centric innovation is the responsibility for the senior management to let the company know that at the end, the innovation initiatives have to contribute to organizational growth—whether in the short term or in the long term.
As our examples of companies such as IBM and Sun showed, even partnering with innovation communities such as open source communities should be based on sound business logic. Many external innovation opportunities might look tempting, especially for managers who want to demonstrate their commitment to the CEO’s call for action on network-centric innovation. In such a context, underlining the need for not abandoning the rigor with which decisions are made to pursue external innovation opportunities is equally important.
As one mid-level manager in a large consumer product company told us, once there is significant buzz in the organization about partnering with external inventor networks and communities, there is a tendency for the network-centric innovation initiative to become an end in itself. This becomes more evident when metrics such as “number of ideas sourced from outside” and “number of external partners” gain higher visibility than those that reflect the real impact of network-centric innovation initiatives on firm growth or revenues.
Senior managers can again take a very key role in emphasizing the need to link all network-centric innovation activities with the company’s overall growth objectives. Thus, when Sun opens up its SPARC architecture and pursues the OpenSPARC initiative, it keeps its focus on the new markets that are likely to open up for its core products and services as a result of the innovation activities of the OpenSPARC community, even if it is in the longer term.
The lesson for senior managers is to make sure that the excitement regarding network-centric innovation opportunities is grounded in the company’s revenue and profit goals.
Actions for “Monday” Morning
We started our journey by exploring the power of the Global Brain and by painting a picture of the landscape of network-centric innovation. Our journey has also taken us into a more detailed analysis of the varied opportunities and the resources and capabilities that companies need to develop to take advantage of such opportunities. Our primary objective in this book has been to prepare you, the reader, to be able to position your company as a player in the rich and diverse landscape of network-centric innovation.
Now that you have gained a deep understanding of network-centric innovation, it is time to chart your company’s own path in this initiative. We have a simple mantra for this: Think BIG, Start SMALL, Scale FAST.
Dial Inc. provides a good case study of how this mantra can play out.
Think Big!
It is important that you consider the entire canvas of network-centric innovation and apply a wider perspective before starting to tunnel down to specific opportunities. Thinking big means ensuring that you are able to develop a coherent story that connects all of your innovation initiatives—even if some of these initiatives emerge or evolve over time. This is where the CEO’s role in providing the “perspective” becomes important.
When Dial first started thinking of exploring external innovation sources—that is, going beyond its traditional sources such as suppliers and partnering with independent inventors—the company didn’t focus on one specific initiative. Instead, its approach was to “think big” and focus on the value such external sourcing can bring to the organization in the long term. The CEO and executive management communicated to the organization their strong commitment to network-centric innovation by establishing an independent organizational unit—the Technology Acquisition group—to orchestrate such efforts. The message was clear—the company is building the foundation for the various network-centric innovation initiatives that are likely to evolve over time.
Start Small!
After you have developed a broad perspective for your company to view network-centric innovation opportunities, it is also equally important to start with an initiative that has manageable scope and whose returns (or results) will be clearly evident. For example, do you have a particular product market or customer segment where you can launch your first network-centric innovation initiative? Or can you isolate the initiative to a particular geographical location or business division?
Creating a “clean room” for your network-centric innovation strategy so as to evaluate and learn from your first initiative is a good idea. Such an approach can also help you earn a quick “win” that can then be used to propel other initiatives.
In the case of Dial, the “clean room” was a simple Web-based initiative called Quest for the Best that the company launched to start connecting with independent inventors. The initiative didn’t involve extensive investments in infrastructure or involve a large number of organizational members. While it was a relatively small program, it was very innovative. Dial was the first consumer product company to establish such a program that involved interacting directly with independent inventors and inventor associations. The results from this program were very positive (several ideas entered the company’s development pipeline), and the program served as a “proof of concept” for the company’s broader network-centric innovation strategy.
Scale Fast!
When you have found success in that first initiative, don’t forget to celebrate the win. However, more importantly, don’t also forget to take things to the next level by “scaling fast.”
Set a more ambitious set of objectives for the initiative, engage the different parts of the organization, and invest extensively in developing the organizational capabilities that would help you achieve those objectives. Your ability to rapidly engage the entire organization in the initiative will help it to take root within the company and attract more organizational resources and creative talent. It will also help generate more initiatives from the different parts of the organization.
Going back to Dial’s example, the scaling of the initiative occurred right after the first inventor competition. Dial formalized the initiative and called it “Partners in Innovation.” The interactions with independent inventors were made to be on a continuous basis and expanded to cover all parts of the company’s product portfolio.
The company also rapidly scaled the program to be global in nature by establishing linkages with the R&D group of its parent company, the Henkel group. With this expanded reach, the entire Henkel Group of companies became potential customers for ideas sourced from U.S.-based inventors by Dial’s technology acquisition group. The company followed this with a global competition, called the Henkel Innovation Trophy, which Dial’s technology acquisition group is driving on behalf of all Henkel companies. This time, the focus for external sourcing is not just U.S.-based inventors but independent inventors anywhere in the world, and the target for placing the innovative ideas is not just Dial but the entire Henkel group. Truly global scaling!
Thus the moral of the story here is—“think big” and make sure the right perspective is adopted, “start small” to get that quick result, and “scale fast” to rapidly engage and involve the entire organization.
We hope that, as you put down this book, you can begin taking the first steps in applying the ideas and concepts that we have talked about. This is the REAL journey—the journey to pursue organic growth by harnessing the creative power of the Global Brain. Good luck on this journey!