Something has gone horribly wrong when a company like Facebook, which applies terrifying amounts of computer-processing power to revolutionising the way that people interact, is forced to go public in a process that was invented before pocket calculators.

The failure of the social network's much-hyped initial public offering - its shares have fallen by 32% since its debut - has highlighted some of the inefficiencies and idiosyncrasies of the IPO process itself. While you cannot legislate for market volatility or greed, and you can never entirely eliminate the tension between issuers and investors or between certainty and price, here are 10 ideas to drag the process into the 21st century.