The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks.

The new age of innovation: driving co-created value through global networks The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value through Global Networks. By C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan. McGraw-Hill, 307 pages. $29.95.

The New Age of Innovation comes with a blue-chip legacy: co-author Prahalad is one of the world's most noted business thinkers and a renowned author of books like Competing for the Future. Here, he teams with a University of Michigan business school colleague following a four-year study of how companies need to reformulate innovation strategies to succeed in the global economy.

Though companies often look for radical, ground-shifting change, the authors find that the best approach is through continuous, incremental change--a kind of relentless fine-tuning. The customer experience has become central, they write, and top companies are "co-creating" interactions with customers in what have become virtually individualized transactions. Indeed, they formulate a relationship of N = 1, which they define as "one customer experience at a time."

That's often difficult in a mass-produced...