It happens all the time.

One day you are the leader, a terror to your competitors, with a growing market share of happy customers.  The next day, your base is abandoning you for an entrant you never saw coming!

Or maybe you're the upstart, racing against towering dinosaurs and your quick-legged fellow egg-stealers to capture the market.

Either way, constant innovation is the single biggest challenge facing every company.  Either way, today's business mantra is, "Innovate or Die."

Innovation used to be simple.  Design a great product or business model.  Patent the idea.  Build a business empire.  Collect profits year after year.

This formula worked in the 19th and 20th centuries, when just one great innovation - the flying machine or the PC, the light bulb or the plain paper copier - could keep a company on top for a generation.  But the old formula doesn't work now.

Today, product life cycles can be counted in days, not decades.  Powerful business models are becoming obsolete.  In 1999, the U.S. granted more than 500 business methods patents.  In 2000, the number jumped to over 800.  If you're thinking inside the box, innovators on the outside will take over your market with new ideas.

Consider Motorola, the world leader in analog cell phones, and the blindsiding it has received from digital phones.  Or Merrill Lynch, which called it spectacularly wrong on on-line trading.  Even Bill Gates admits that, without new ideas, Microsoft is always two years away from failure.

No company can afford to stop innovating.  Because, now more than ever, the minute you think you're finished with innovation, you're finished in business.  You're a fossil.

Isolated books, articles, and consultants can help.  But there's been nothing to stimulate profit-oriented creativity and business innovation month-in and month-out -- until Innovation@Work. Still unconvinced?