Announcing the 2012-13 HBR/McKinsey M-Prize

When we launched the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation last year, our goal was to surface the world’s most amazing management practices, and to highly those individuals around the world who are reinventing “the technology of human accomplishment.”

Working with our partners, we teed up three knotty management challenges:

• How can we use the new “social tools” of the Web to reinvent how we lead, manage and organize?
• How can we “banish bureaucracy” and create organizations that are radically empowering?
• How can we reinvent capitalism for the long-term by strengthening the “moral capital” of our organizations and embedding a deep sense of stewardship?

Some 400 robust contributions later, we are more confident than ever that together we can tackle the challenge of building organizations that are fit for the 21^st century and fit for human beings.  (Click here for a list of the winning entries.) 

In planning the second annual M-Prize competition, we invited the entire MIX community to help us prioritize today’s most pressing management issues—the make-or-break challenges that cry out for unconventional thinking and bold new practices.  Of all the challenges that were nominated, Innovating Innovation engendered the most discussion and support, followed closely by Cultivating 21^st Century Capabilities.   These will be the first two challenges we’ll tee up in the second iteration of the M-Prize tournament.  We’ll announce a third “wild card” challenge next year.

Today, though, we’re launching the first M-Prize challenge: Innovating Innovation. The goal: to create organizations in which innovation is instinctual, in which the passion to create is palpable, and where rewards for innovation, monetary and otherwise, are truly mouth-watering.  Tackling a problem of this depth and breadth is going to take a lot of help.  So if you’re eager to get innovation out of the wings and onto center stage, we hope you’ll contribute a “story” (a real-life case study of a company’s innovative practices), or a “hack” (a bold, new idea for making innovation endemic in our organizations.)