What if the United States set out to be the world's leading exporter of education? Direct revenue from tuition would be only one of the benefits, because when foreign students return home to become entrepreneurs, they rely on the networks and tools they acquired in the U.S.--and they expand their home economies, creating demand for U.S. exports.
HBR's editors searched for the best new ideas related to the practice of management and came up with a collection that is as diverse as it is provocative. The 2004 HBR List includes emergent concepts from biology, network science, management theory, and more. A few highlights: Richard Florida wonders why U.S. society doesn't seem to be thinking about the flow of people as the key to America's advantage in the "creative age." Diane L. Coutu describes how the revolution in neurosciences will have a major impact on business. Clayton M. Christensen explains the law of conservation of attractive profits: When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products usually emerges at an adjacent stage. Daniel H. Pink explains why the master of fine arts is the new MBA. Herminia Ibarra describes how companies can get the most out of managers returning from leadership-development programs. Iqbal Quadir suggests a radical fix for the third world's trade problems: Get the World Bank to lend to rich countries so that there are resources for retraining workers in dying industries.
Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Bangladesh's GrameenPhone, discusses the failure of foreign aid to rescue moribund third-world economies and the need to empower local entrepreneurs. The most important feature of his company, he explains, isn't the phone system itself but the microloans that mobilize an army of individual entrepreneurs to meet an unsatisfied need profitably.