Use of the Macroinnovation Method allows organizations to achieve a state of Enterprise-wide Innovation, a condition in which all members of an enterprise are engaged in problem (or opportunity) detection and resolution. But this need not be confined to corporate or commercial settings. The approach we advocate is just as useful in a public or government context as it is in a private one. What Enterprise-wide Innovation brings to any organization is an enhanced capacity to learn and adapt in an increasingly complex world. This, in the end, is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

There are four key perspectives to take into account when considering the value of Enterprise-wide Innovation:
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-	Value to its management and staff
-	Value to its shareholders
-	Value to its customers
-	Value to other stakeholders (trading partners, communities, the environment)

The Macroinnovation Method (aka, the 'Policy Synchronization Method,' or PSM) offers value to every one of these groups. To management and staff, it offers a qualitative jump in agility -- the capacity to responsively detect and adapt to events in the marketplace. To shareholders, it offers assurances that knowledge is being produced and shared in an environment of appropriate openness, and that the potential for Enron-like failures is remote. To customers, it offers a supplier that is considerably more apt to understand their needs, and to better withstand the test of time than others. And finally, to other stakeholders, it offers encouraging indications that the behaviors of the organization will be mutually-rewarding and responsible, and that they'll also lead to sustainable outcomes.

A discussion of the PSM method's value propositions, from the perspective of each of the key stakeholder groups involved in an organization, follows below:

Value Proposition to Management and Staff
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	Improves the rate and quality of innovation: By engaging the full membership of an organization in the formal learning and innovation process, a firm's capacity to detect problems and opportunities and to address them effectively is dramatically enhanced. Different aspects of this value are explored more fully below.
	Enables earlier and more thorough detection of problems and opportunities: By sharing the responsibility for knowledge processing with all members of a firm, management can dramatically improve the degree to which serious problems or valuable opportunities are detected. Employees who are, in fact, full participants in management's learning process will greatly enhance the organization's capacity to detect and more quickly respond to changes in the business environment.
	Expands the range of business solutions available to management: The PSM method includes treatment of the intellectual and/or 'values diversity' in a firm, a variable that relates to its diversity of ethos, or what we call ethodiversity. In doing so, it directly impacts the range of perspectives and worldviews collectively held by a firm, and which managers and others can draw upon as they encounter new problems and opportunities. Wider degrees of ethodiversity translate into broader portfolios of ideas and potential strategies for dealing with problems and opportunities. As one manager put it, "Here, we are more interested in becoming a diverse organization of individuals than we are in becoming an organization of diverse individuals." It's diversity at the organizational level that counts most when it comes to organizational performance -- ethodiversity, that is.
	Enhances the quality of inventive thinking: Not all inventions go on to become innovations, but all innovations start out as inventions. Increasing inventive thinking and the level of related efforts is key, then, to enhancing innovation. The PSM method accomplishes this in three ways. First, it affords a greater degree of freedom to individuals and groups to pursue learning agendas of their own choosing, a strategy that taps into and exploits individual and group-level passions and interests. Second, it sets the conditions in which learning groups, or communities, are free to form and carry out their affairs, with full management support. And third, it explores opportunities to share entitlements to innovations with employees. The quality and volume of inventive thinking throughout the enterprise flourishes under these conditions, thereby increasing the breadth and depth of the pool of potential innovations.
	Raises employee satisfaction and morale: Employees who are actively engaged in the organizational learning and innovation process will feel more satisfied and enriched in their work because of the degree to which their own intrinsic interests, views, and opinions are taken into account by management. This is more than just lip service. In the PSM method, knowledge processing performed at the management level is deliberately inclusive of employee input and criticism. Further, employees are free to engage in open debate on decisions taken by management, thereby raising the visibility of their contributions and the impact of their views. In more aggressive cases, employee representatives sit on boards of directors and actually participate in decision-making.
	Leads to richer 'communities of communities': As noted above, one of the PSM method's goals is to set the conditions in which communities of practice, learning, etc. are more likely to form and flourish. As wellsprings of knowledge, communities are essential to learning and innovation in a firm, and the PSM method takes an active role in making their formation more likely, and their contributions more lasting.
	Enhances knowledge sharing and integration: By focusing both on the policies and programs for knowledge sharing in an organization, as well as the quality of related infrastructures, the PSM method can enhance the flow of information and knowledge to workers, especially as it relates to the performance of their work. In addition, the PSM method places an equal emphasis on 'transparency' in management, in the sense that it advocates, and provides for, openness in access to the views held by managers, as well as the basis of their thinking. Under these conditions, Enron-like failures are rare events.
	Results in 'sustainable innovation': Because the PSM method is aimed at eliciting and supporting intrinsic organizational innovation, it is more sustainable than other innovation methods. This is because instead of prescribing an innovation system or body of practice, it supports, strengthens, and reinforces the self-organizing tendencies of organizations to innovate in their own endemic ways.

Value Proposition to Shareholders
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	Enhances the quality of information about a company's operations: Use of the PSM method constitutes a direct and powerful means of building what Warren Bennis of USC describes as "social architectures for openness," an antidote to Enron-like scandals. The PSM method is based on an understanding of what it means for an organization to be 'open' in this regard, and what the associated leverage points are and where they can be found. All of this works to the shareholders' advantage, since the 'open enterprise' makes it more likely that employee views on management's performance will be open and accessible to scrutiny from the outside world.
	Lowers risk in investments: Because its decisions are more open to scrutiny from its own employees, as well as the outside world, management decisions are taken more cautiously, thereby lowering the risk of Enron-like failures, while increasing the security of shareholders' investments.
	Enhances financial performance: Apart from the benefits derived from 'openness,' companies that use the PSM method also tend to display market-leading business performance, thereby increasing the value of their owners' equity and their returns on investment. This is directly attributable to the degree to which a PSM-managed environment is marked by an enhanced capacity to detect and solve problems and opportunities. Business outcomes in a PSM-managed environment benefit, accordingly.
	Increases the value of intellectual capital: The social capacity to learn and innovate is arguably the most valuable form of intellectual, or intangible, capital in a firm. There is more than metaphor at work here. Company values are directly impacted by non-book, intangible 'assets,' including the social capacity to learn, innovate, and adapt. We call this 'social innovation capital,' a concept that we first developed in 2001. The PSM method is nothing if not a management discipline aimed at increasing the value and effectiveness of social innovation capital, the successful use of which can therefore have direct, positive impact on a company's market valuation. The only thing more valuable than valuable intellectual capital is the sustainable capacity to produce it!

Value Proposition to Customers
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Enhances the quality of fit between a supplier and its customer: Because of their commitment to enterprise-wide learning and innovation, companies that use the PSM method are inherently more capable of responding to individual expressions of customer demand, thereby increasing the value and fit of their offerings -- and themselves -- to their customers. Customers, in turn, can expect to see more flexibility and responsiveness from providers who use the PSM method. Indeed, their own unpredictable evolutions in requirements are more likely to be met, as they occur, by suppliers that have achieved Enterprise-wide Innovation, as compared to those which haven't.

Lowers risk to the customer: The risk of disruption to a business when one of its major suppliers suffers a crisis in the marketplace such as, say, Arthur Andersen did, can be mitigated by choosing to do business with suppliers whose operating environments are 'open' and innovative. Customers looking to do business with companies that strive to maintain 'social architectures for openness' and 'high-performance knowledge processing' need look no further than to determine whether or not prospective suppliers are employing the PSM method. If so, they can rest assured that management at PSM-managed organizations have embraced 'openness' as a core value, and have also taken steps to achieve Enterprise-wide Innovation. Companies that have done so are far more likely to do a good job of detecting and addressing problems and opportunities, and are far less likely to disappear or suffer a failure.

Value Proposition to Other Stakeholders
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	Enhances the quality of relationships with trading partners: For all of the same reasons PSM-managed companies work well for their customers, so, too, do they work well for their trading partners. Companies that prioritize continuous learning and innovation are bound to be more flexible and adaptable in their dealings with partners, subcontractors, and other business affiliates. Doing business with intelligent, agile, and adaptable partners is always preferable. Further, PSM-managed companies will generally be more flexible in terms of their capacity to mold themselves to different working arrangements with their partners, since they tend to be more agile than their traditional, hierarchical competitors. As author Joseph Pine presciently predicted in his 1993 book, Mass Customization, the next step in business competition has indeed become "the mass customization of enterprises."
	Reduces risk of irresponsible social behaviors by companies: In companies where the average worker has an inviolate right to scrutinize and critique decisions taken by management, actions harmful or damaging to the community are far less likely to occur. Indeed, use of the PSM method is an important ingredient in broader social responsibility efforts, since they help to ensure employee and stakeholder participation in the conduct of business affairs. The reasoning here is that while dubious decisions might pass muster in small, concealed groups, the chances of their survival in larger, more open environments are considerably lower -- desirably so. Unsustainable social behaviors should not be sustained, and use of the PSM method can help detect and resolve them, just as it can aid in the detection and resolution of problems and opportunities of any other kind.
	Reduces the risk of irresponsible environmental behaviors by companies: The logic here is similar to the logic used immediately above in the human context. Organizations also have a duty of stewardship and respect for the ecosystems in which they work, just as they do in human social systems. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that unwanted impacts on the environment, be they intentional or otherwise, are curtailed as fully as possible. Making it possible, therefore, for employees and other stakeholders in an organization to have knowledge of, and influence on, decisions about a company's impact on the environment is critical. Use of the PSM method is an important step in achieving this goal, since it fundamentally exposes management decisions and the thinking behind them to employee scrutiny, just as it does the reverse, as well -- i.e., management learns from employees, and employees learn from management. The environment benefits in the exchange, since fewer corporate decisions with potentially deleterious effects on the natural world are able to get that far.

Having made all of the arguments set forth above for openness and access to management decisions, we feel compelled to be just as clear about what the PSM method does NOT, in fact, advocate. In short, it does not advocate direct employee or third-party involvement in the decision-making process of a firm. It does not, in this sense, advocate for interference of any kind in management's authority to make decisions, or in the governance process of a corporation or the management of its operations.

What the PSM does advocate, by contrast, is openness in the knowledge processing affairs of a firm. Decisions taken by managers, and the reasoning behind them, should be open to scrutiny, input, and thoughtful criticism by workers, shareholders, and stakeholders of other kinds. Further, decisions made by managers in a PSM-managed environment should always be open to scrutiny, after the fact, if not -- frequently -- before the fact.

We are also NOT advocating for the public exposure of all management decisions all of the time, or for the inclusion of all workers, in all management debates, all of the time. Rather, what we are suggesting in practice is that decisions be made about what to keep private and what not to keep private, and that at least those debates should be made public. Matters that fall on the public side of the line can then be debated in public; matters that don't can be kept private. These decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis, so no global prescriptions can be made here, only principles for doing so at a local level.

This brief caveat to the foregoing discussion of the PSM method's value propositions highlights the importance of keeping the distinction between Business Processing (and its management) separate in our minds from Knowledge Processing (and its management). Management's authority to make decisions in the Business Processing Environment is undisputed. The PSM method challenges none of that. The production and sharing of knowledge, however, should be considerably more social and open, the achievement of which is, of course, regulated through use of the PSM method. That's where context and experience come into play. There are no pat answers here, only a methodology for making effective learning and innovation management interventions.