On the drawing board

The challenge

Fierce competition in the global market has made innovation and differentiation a necessity for every company. At the same time, to achieve market success and sustain a competitive advantage, businesses also need to increase productivity by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of research and development (R&D); decreasing the time needed to realize a return on investment; and optimizing current and future technology investments. Ultimately, companies must rethink their strategies and introduce innovations more broadly across the organization and among their business partners to effectively increase productivity and profitability for R&D projects.

To develop growth strategies, industry leaders and company executives must first delve into their industries and businesses to discover how they can achieve growth by innovating; what they need to know to become more innovative; and what procedures need to be implemented to ensure that they’re getting the most innovation from their existing resources.

The approach

Working together, IBM Global Business Services and IBM Research now offer consulting services based on IBM’s expertise in numerous innovation processes, including research and emerging business opportunities. This new IBM Research Services practice, initiated and led by Dr. Iris Ginzburg, helps clients design and implement customized innovation processes; explore new, technology-based growth opportunities; run innovation workshops; and guide open collaboration. Although relatively new, innovation management services are already gaining momentum and helping IBM clients increase collaboration and integration of business processes both internally and with external partners.

“The approach is unique in that we bring together researchers who can think creatively about innovation, and combine them with IBM Global Business Services experts who have a well-developed consulting framework and are armed with IBM’s business savvy,” notes Ginzburg. “This is a winning combination through which we can help clients achieve their goals.”

Although IBM’s initial work with clients has focused primarily on product innovation, innovation management encompasses a wide spectrum of activities and involves many new areas, including service innovation and process innovation. Services are becoming vital for technology-based companies that now need to offer their customers total on demand solutions to compete with low-cost product commoditizers. Many manufacturing companies want to build services around the products they offer, but don’t really know how. “Services are the foundation that will drive technology management for the new global economy,” believes Ginzburg.

Innovation management is also opening doors to other new opportunities for cooperation and collaboration. “You can’t know everything and don’t have to,” continues Ginzburg. “Companies need openness to succeed. We can help them understand how to cooperate, turning competitors into strategic partners that can add value to innovations that may otherwise remain untapped. A better understanding of cooperation—similar to that available for open source—could drive the technology ecosystem to new heights. “

Next steps

Ginzburg is realistic about directions for this new area of service. “Right now, innovation management is still very broad,” she explains. “We intend to narrow things down to develop a more concrete offering for our clients and scale up our delivery capabilities. We’re exploring the different areas in a systematic way, defining scenarios, finding out what interests clients, what’s available in academia, and helping define innovation and its various areas of specialties.”