C.K Prahalad, the visionary management guru, took 4 years to create this book on new age of innovation.

N=1 through R=G

In a nutshell, he concludes that in order for an enterprise to survive in today's world, they need to have individual customer focus (N=1). But, this cannot be achieved by a single enterprise. thus they need to leverage the resources globally (R=G).

Though he himself does not provide new ideas, he has identified the innovation taking place on the web as well as within the enterprises; and has provided a conscious framework for thinking and adapting these innovation based on his simple crux N=1 & R=G.

Prahald attempts to identify the emerging trends in the competitive landscape and value co-creation process.

Holy Grail

Prahald's N=1 R=G is not a holy grail, that any firm is yet to achieve.

In my view, at-least three firms have already achieved this in Internet domain.

They are: Amazon, Google and e-bay.

All these firms allow individual  customized service by leveraging the  co-created value of global resources, be it small firms, individual developers or large firms like FedEx.

R=G

All of these firm have very low barrier to entry for participation. They expose Web Services API, to allow their co-optitors (cooperation from competition) to integrate their business processes seamlessly. 

N=1

All these firms have a easy to use platforms to create and share widgets. These widgets can be created online, by anyone with very little or no programming skills. These widgets can be deployed on web pages by just a copy and pasting a few lines of HTML codes.

Widgets

These widgets have four components.

• CSS: Style Sheets, that can change the look and feel
• Markup tags like xHTML and XML. This defines the content.
  
• Client side scripting, mostly JavaScript,  that defines the logic
• Server side scripts, here Java, JavaScript, PHP and even Python are used.

Analytic

 Individual attention can be paid through insights gained from studying trends of user interaction in mass scale. All these firms leverage analysis gaining from usage patterns of their web properties and also allow their co-optitors to access the analytical tools to fine tune their strategies for Monetization of the co-created value.

The Real Holy Grail

The real holy grail is to transpose the innovation within an Enterprise. And, our journey is in search of Enterprise 2.0. The Enterprise that leverages Web 2.0 technologies within its firewalls to achieve N=1 through R=G.