IESE Signs Agreement with The Boston Consulting Group
Web 2.0 Meets Management 2.0

Philip B. Evans and Rainer Strack, senior partners and managing directors of The Boston Consulting Group, shared their expert knowledge on Web 2.0 and talent management with IESE alumni earlier this year.

The special Continuous Education sessions form part of an agreement between the school and the consulting firm to publish a series of video interviews on strategy and management.

Evans discussed Web 2.0’s impact on business at the school’s Barcelona campus on May 14, focusing on opportunities for innovation, distribution and collaboration. Strack set out the principle challenges in talent management and how to overcome them in his session at IESE’s Madrid campus on June 3. 

Along with IESE professors, Josep Valor and Sandra Sieber, Evans said Web 2.0 is the Internet as a vehicle for the distributed creation and sharing of information.

With over 70 million active users, online communities such as Facebook often grab the headlines, but Evans showed how Web 2.0 matters to “people in general and not just teenagers.” One example of the net as a platform for information sharing and collaboration is InnoCentive. This website creates a meeting point for organizations with a problem (seekers) and a community of engineers, scientists, inventors and business people offering answers (solvers). InnoCentive manages the relationship between the two. “They define precisely who owns the intellectual property at any point,” Evans said.

On average, companies have worked internally on a problem for two years before posting it on InnoCentive. A solver cracks it in a third of all cases and in 85 percent of the successful resolutions, the solver comes from a different discipline than the company.

“Communities are a new, third vehicle for economic activity, for getting things done,” he said. "It is Web 2.0’s ability to tap into this latent rather than explicit knowledge, along with the usability of its technical applications that makes it a powerful tool in Enterprise 2.0," Evans concluded.
At the Madrid session, Strack shared the findings of a BCG study on the impact of shifting demographics on human resources. The study identified the provision of a sustainable work/life balance and executive development as the principle challenges in talent management.

The BCG senior partner pointed out that baby boomers are beginning to retire. As this pool of talent dries up, the retention of experienced managers is becoming a competitive advantage. “Soon it will be harder to find and retain talent than to get funding from the markets,” he said.