Good question, Bob - What competitors are out there to IT as a source of innovation? From the CEO's vantage point, I guess there are quite a few options: creative financial moves with private equity, new strategic HR organization designs, new pricing strategies, advances in materials science applied to physical products, creative and aesthetic design in new areas like services, a new wave of investment in brand development, and many more besides. Investment funds allocated to any of these would have some project trickle-down toward IT enablement, but they do not have IT as the core innovation catalyst. I met a plastics industry CIO recently who told me he did not see IT as important to business innovation. I asked him what was, and he quickly became enthusiastic about a future where we all drink beer from plastic bottles instead of glass. Apparently, recent developments in PET bottle technology make this possible for the first time. His attitude told me he was very business-aligned. He had already standardized, consolidated and outsourced IT where appropriate. It's interesting, though, that he saw no obvious big IT-enabled idea to offer the company. My point is that the IT industry - all of us - compete for management mind share with a number of other progressive forces in business. Sometimes, I think we collectively take IT's innovative position for granted. Moore's Law needs to be converted into new economic-value-creating concepts - and that takes effort, because they don't seem to be growing on trees.