The power to allocate resources is going to be much more widely distributed in companies. There will be hundreds of people to fund new ideas, new projects. There will be fierce competition. They'll get to spend more of their capital doing that. They will be rewarded by having more of their budget under their discretionary control go into new ideas.

More and more decisions in companies are going to be based on a wisdom of the crowd or collective intelligence. Somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of all executive decisions are wrong. Often very large decisions about acquisitions or market expansion get made by very small numbers of people. That's going to change. In the future, the idea somebody would make the decision to do a big [project] without testing that idea against the wisdom of the entire organization would just be foolhardy.

Sidebar: CIOs Seen as Obstacles to Innovation