Ever heard of the term ‘management innovation’? Neither did we until today, when the Harvard Business Review and management consultancy McKinsey announced teaming up to recognize progressive business leaders in this vein.
These two houses of global management expertise are sponsoring the first ever Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. The awards are being organized and powered by Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an open innovation platform aimed at “reinventing management for the 21st century.” McKinsey, HBR as well as other companies like Gartner, London Business School, The Human Capital Institute and Red Hat are behind MIX as sponsors.
Submissions for the inaugural Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation are open starting today through July 18th — when the first of three phases for the M-Prize ends.
This first phase of the competition, the Management 2.0 Challenge, seeks “progressive practices and disruptive ideas that illustrate how the governing principles and tools of the Web can make our organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable.” Phases two and three of the M-Prize competition will run over the remainder of the year, focusing on business leaders “leveraging technology, reinventing strategy, and rethinking organizations.”
What is Management 2.0, exactly? Professor Gary Hamel of London Business School outlines the concept well in a blog post on MIX, speaking to how we are on the frontier of allowing Web and social technologies to truly transform management from its roots to its limbs. HBR.org Editor Eric Hellweg also wrote an article outlining the competition and speaking to Management 2.0 we’d recommend you read, too.
Know someone who should be in the running for the M-Prize from Boston? Check out current submitted entries here on the MIX platform to make sure they are equally great candidates.
Who’s ultimately judging and selecting winners from the submissions? Bestselling author Clay Shirky; Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media; Gary Hamel; HBR.org Editor Eric Hellweg; London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton; McKinsey & Company Director James Manyika; Gartner Group Vice President Mark McDonald; and author of The New Capitalist Manifesto, Umair Haque.
Winners will be included in a feature within Harvard Business Review and HBR.org, on the MIX platform, in the McKinsey Quarterly publication, and during an awards ceremony the Spring of 2012. Each of these three organizations offered their own two-cents related to the prize in the press release formally issued today around the initiative:
- “We’re looking for today’s most exciting ideas on reinventing management for the 21st century,” said Gary Hamel, cofounder and visionary behind the MIX, and the author of The Future of Management. “If you have something to say about why organizations need to be as adaptable as the people in them, then we want your ideas. The goal here is to remake business for the betterment of both industry and society.”
- “For more than eight decades, Harvard Business Review has been on the vanguard of provocative and practical management ideas,” said Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of HBR. “With our participation in this exciting new contest, we feel we’re continuing to live into our mission of improving the practice of management and its impact in a changing world. We look forward to reading the great new ideas out there—from tomorrow’s best thinkers.”
- “In today’s volatile global economy every industry faces the challenge of disruptive innovation,” said Rik Kirkland, Senior Managing Editor at McKinsey & Company. “Business as usual is not an option. That’s why we are so delighted to collaborate with Harvard Business Review and the MIX in encouraging new thinkers to come forward with fresh ideas and unexpected insights into how to meet a very different set of management challenges.”
