Solving a corporate problem is not much different from solving a scientific problem.
A website called InnoCentive, for example, can be used by firms to harness the power of the crowd to solve tricky corporate problems.
As large, global companies struggle with replacing aging senior leaders, they are using some new approaches to identify, train — and keep — their best potential managers, including assessing their high-potential employees with formal evaluations and putting such employees on the frontlines of business dilemmas by asking them to solve real corporate problems during training programmes.
SOI extends beyond private and corporate problem solving.
In solving practical corporate culture problems it has proven to be useful to classify them along two dimensions the "willingness to cooperate" and the "awareness of the overall positive effects of cooperation".
That's certainly the case with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's latest foray into corporate problem-solving, namely his public statement that Citigroup executives should forego bonuses this year because massive layoffs appear to be in the offing.
His bet was that I.B.M.'s competitive advantage would be as the "foremost integrator of technologies" to solve business problems for corporate customers.
Unlike some others, Mr. George does not think that new laws like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will solve the problems in corporate leadership.
"The future of computing is not about selling boxes, not about technology per se, but about using technology to solve business problems for corporate enterprise customers," said Robert E. Knowling Jr., a board member who is chairman of Internet Access Technologies.
It's tempting for underperforming companies to believe that only an outsider can solve their problems, particularly since corporate boards already tend to see C.E.O.s as "corporate saviors," as the Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana puts it.
