Rosie Lombardi

Virtually every assumption floating around the business mindsphere about customer loyalty is just plain wrong. And this faulty thinking is the source of a lot of dysfunctional corporate behaviour, including sinking big bucks in customer relationship management (CRM) systems that fail to deliver any value. That's the ominous message of a book authored by a team of researchers.

The Extreme Blue program is IBM's incubator for combining great talent and technology to fuel innovation. The company has been running this intensive 15-week internship program since 2004 in Canada. This year, 24 students from various universities were selected out of pool of about 500 applicants to participate in the program.

Few people consider what happens to their cheques when they make a deposit at an ATM. But there is an unimaginably complex back-end process to handle that piece of paper once it gets sucked into the machine. Financial institutions spend billions on paper care

"Finders, keepers," the old saw goes

Virus attacks are still wreaking all kinds of havoc on many North American companies. One of the newest bugs on the block is aptly dubbed

While beer has been known to diminish intellectual - and other - performance, business intelligence (BI) is being used to boost an international brewer's performance and corporate smarts. Labatt Breweries of Canada has created an enterprise-wide business intelligence (BI) system that helps identify and respond more effectively to customer needs.

Wikinomics provides many case studies of different successful forms of business collaboration already under way. One company that is showcased as a shining example of "customer co-creation" in the book is growing by leaps and bounds.

Not only does IT matter, it's at the heart of the biggest change in the century, says Don Tapscott, pundit and CEO of New Paradigm.