The management ideas and trends that have people talking.

By Sara Wilson

For the past four years, the Harvard Business Review has been tracking down some of today’s brightest people in the fields of academia, business, the arts and politics to get their insight and ideas regarding innovative new methods for running, marketing and managing businesses more effectively. This year’s search was more extensive than ever, as the Review linked forces and minds with the World Economic Forum in a partnership that involved panels and brainstorming sessions. “We’re looking for ideas that are not currently talked about but we expect will be talked about in the next one to five years,” says Leigh Buchanan, senior editor of the Review.

This year’s Harvard Business Review List of Breakthrough Ideas includes contributions from experts ranging from deans of schools to chairmen of companies. Here’s a closer look at five of the 20 ideas and trends that made this year’s list.

The Velcro Organization
Flexibility is the name of the game and can be a business’s key secret of success. Traditional companies tend to be so dependent on titles and roles that they often abide by a solid company hierarchy, overlooking the fact that, at times, it is the very structure of a corporation that prevents positive change and fluidity. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, the ability to do away with rigid titles and embrace a system in which managers can adopt roles according to the tasks at hand is the key to being able to compete effectively in increasingly global markets. “Companies eventually need to put in place the kinds of systems that allow people to move back and forth across these different roles and sort out the corporation’s needs as opposed to just their individual job’s or function’s needs as flexibly as possible,” says Buchanan. “Like Velcro, they should be able to pull up and drop in pretty easily, but stick where they are for the time that they’re needed to stick.”

Demand-Side Innovation
For too long, the focus of businesses has been on the supply side, but change the focus to the demand side and the results may be much greater. Author Jeffrey F. Rayport contends that in today’s society, where products have half the shelf life, a new approach is necessary in order to really capture the consumer’s attention. This new approach is demand-side innovation, where the focus is shifted away from the product and directed instead toward how a company relates and interacts with its customers.

To illustrate his argument, Rayport points to eBay and Priceline as recent prime examples of companies selling traditional products or services but appealing to consumers in a new way by allowing consumers to conduct business and pay the prices they desire. Demand-side innovation can even involve developing a new identity and brand in order to attract a new segment of the population.

Rayport points out additional ways to apply demand-side innovation, such as relating to customers on an emotional level, collecting customer information to create customized offerings such as personalized web page content, and involving customers in the creation of products and services.

“When” Is the New “What”
Countless marketing dollars have gone into identifying who the audience is and what message is best to send them. However, these “who” and “what” elements of marketing are falling to the wayside as it becomes apparent that timing is everything. “People are so time-strapped and overwhelmed with marketing messages that they’re not going to pay attention to any one message—even if they’re the right person for that message and it’s exactly the right one—unless it falls in their laps at exactly the right time,” explains Buchanan.

With this in mind, a variety of companies across all industries are embracing information technology systems that distinguish this element of timing as an important one. According to the Harvard Business Review, dialog marketing, a multistep conversation between the company and the consumer, is leading the way. Effective as dialog marketing is, Buchanan points out that it can be costly to put these IT systems in place, and for this reason it might not be an ideal method for small businesses that can’t afford the investment.

Blog-Trolling in the Bitstream
The marketers of today should not underestimate the importance of blogs. A product of the Internet, blogs are becoming essential in the sharing of ideas and opinions. According to the Review, blogs now influence what people think, do and buy.

It sounds like a marketer’s dream. However, as Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of technology and the director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, points out, blogging comes with its own set of rules that must be understood in order to use it effectively. For example, blogospheres, where blogs are posted, should be perceived as places in which to participate, not to advertise outright. Also, to win over bloggers, marketers must not control them but instead be willing to openly share information about their companies with them.

Blogs are the way of the future, and Sawhney predicts they will eventually become a full-fledged, official media branch. “Blogs are the most conversational of all the forms of media,” he writes. “And marketers can’t afford to be left out of the talk.”

The Coming Crisis Over Intellectual Property Rights
It started out innocently enough with peer-to-peer networking on the Internet and the downloading of songs and movies. However, protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) has rapidly become a serious issue that affects businesses large and small—especially those conducting business in China, where IPR is completely disregarded. Such companies must take extra precautions and plan their overseas activities carefully, taking into account the potential consequences if IPR is not protected.

The Harvard Business Review recommends that companies determine what intellectual property, if any, they can afford to lose. Among the other precautions to take are: Companies should keep key production technologies outside of China; they should stay away from joint ventures where they might not be able to protect their secrets; and they should be prepared to pursue pirates in court.

While businesses can take some steps to protect themselves, the violation of IPR is happening on an ever-greater scale—and is quickly leading to a dire need to revamp the entire system.

Sara Wilson is a writer for Entrepreneur magazine.