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What does all this mean for today's company looking to jump-start its innovation programs and processes, and today's individual looking to participate in making his or her own, or his or her employer's, enterprise more innovative?

Dave Pollard has continued his great work on networked organizations and innovation paper.

Hierarchy and Autocracy are the Enemies of Innovation: There is a strong creative tension between individuals and the communities they elect to or are asked to be part of, caused by divergent needs, drivers, and behaviours. Each individual and each community needs its own space. Flat, small, responsive, democratic organizations are inherently more innovative.

Innovation Needs an Urgent Problem: True innovation only occurs where there is consensus that there is an important problem to solve and a sense of urgency to solve it.

Cooperation is Replacing Competition: Competition is now dysfunctional, a vestige of earlier times of resource scarcity, and cooperation is now essential to effective innovation.

The Customer Rules: The customer is now king and needs only better decision making tools to become the sole driver of economic activity, rendering obsolete the need for marketing, branding, and other producer-driven mechanisms of influencing customer actions.

Female Organizational Style is More Innovative Than Male: As shown in the table below, organizational structures, processes and behaviours more commonly associated with businesses run by women are gaining traction in the New Economy, and that bodes well for innovation.

The Emerging New Economy Will Accelerate Innovation: Despite the current waves of globalization, corporatism and increased concentration of wealth and power, the Internet and other new technologies will inexorably break the strangle-hold of riak-averse oligopolies and unleash a new age of astonishing innovation.