Lightweight innovation processes are emerging on the web, aided by new ideas about how to organize innovation and technologies that reduce the cost and complexity of incremental innovation. But which of these tools might enable a shift to lightweight models in other industries? This section highlights a few generalized tools discovered in our research that are likely to deliver specific capabilities to organizations that seek to experiment with lightweight models. We organize these tools into four broad domains: knowledge, people, money and places.

In 2007, the Institute for the Future forecast on lightweight infrastructure introduced a set of characteristics common in the design of emerging technical systems. When we look for lightweight innovation, we are more concerned with the characteristics of organizations and processes of innovation than the physical objects and networks of infrastructure.

I learned with great sadness about the loss of William Mitchell, 65, this past friday after a long battle with cancer. Bill was the chair of my Ph.D. committee, a mentor and a friend.

It's great to see a company that gets lightweight innovation and is willing to stick it's neck out. In partnership with NYC-based ChallengePost, Thomson Reuters is offering $25,000 in prizes to developers that create innovative mobile apps that leverage its financial data APIs.

Opening up R&D organizations to outside ideas has become a powerful weapon in the strategic arsenal of research managers. As Henry Chesbrough writes, “[O]pen innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.”  This strategy has been associated with notable commercial successes, such as Procter & Gamble’s SpinBrush, sourced not from internal R&D but rather a group of inventors in Cleveland.

Over the last week, as the sudden eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano disrupted air travel throughout Europe, many people and organizations fell back to the dense and multi-functional communications web that has grown up between cities and continents over the last 20 years. Cisco and other companies with a big commercial stake in a rapid expansion of videoconferencing heralded the arrival of a new paradigm in business "travel".

When I first joined the Institute four years ago, I spent much of 2006 looking at the prospects of prediction markets for long-range forecasting. For the 5-10 year time range that IFTF typical does forecasting for, prediction markets were of limited use. People just didn't have the patience to make long-term bets.

At a mixer for The Hive at 55, a new coworking space launched recently by the Downtown Alliance here in Manhattan, I accidentally met one of the employees of a new startup called ShopKeep. Founded by ex-PWC technology consultant turned wine store-entrepreneur Jason Richelson, the project grew out of the retail entrepreneur's frustration with available point of sale and retail customer management systems.

This is the second in a series of monthly articles presenting the Institute for the Future's forecast on the future of lightweight innovation. In the first post, we explored the how lightweight models for building the web are changing the way companies innovate. This month, we look at some of the key strategic challenges this shift poses for existing institutions.