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Ruoyi Zhou applies her expertise in managing Almaden Research's Innovation Services to develop a new service offering to help companies discern future opportunities and prioritize and maximize research and development investments.

Disruptive innovation occurs when upstart businesses make inroads into an established market through offerings that ultimately reshape the market, according to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Established firms must remain vigilant against disruptive change that can erode their core customer base, often by countering with innovative solutions of their own. The key to success in times of sudden change is the ability to spot the disruptors in time to make this countermove.

At IBM's Almaden Research Center, Ruoyi Zhou manages Innovation Services, a program that enables IBM Global Business Services clients to tap the expertise of one of the world's most prominent groups of cross-industry researchers and scientists who offer the knowledge, tools and solutions to help solve complex business problems. Ruoyi brings her expertise in both hardware and software development management to the tasks of building unique and scalable solutions through research innovation, expertise and collaboration.

During her nearly ten years with IBM, Ruoyi has served as lead engineer for the design of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) magnetic recording heads and the development of disk technology. She also has played an integral role in the launch of the two gigabyte family of IBM TotalStorage® SAN Fibre Channel switches. Prior to her assignment at Almaden, she managed and led cross-functional and cross-company teams in developing storage virtualization software.

As the technical staff to Dr. Mark Dean, lab director at Almaden Research, Ruoyi has also been involved in research management and cross-functional research project coordination. In late 2005, she was appointed as manager for Innovation Services and began concentrating on developing a new offering called the Impact of Future Technology (IoFT), a service aimed at helping IBM Global Business Services clients to better manage research and development (R&D) investment portfolios, prepare for disruptive change, and more clearly understand how political and economic events and scientific breakthroughs can affect their organizations.

IoFT's three-tier process for analyzing the future uses methods that go far beyond mere extrapolation of current trends. IoFT specialists explore the technology landscape and seek to identify signposts and other disruptors or game changers that may spell new opportunities or threats for IBM clients. The goal is to give businesses a tool to help them prioritize, estimate costs and benefits, manage a portfolio of technology investments, and look fairly far into the future without being limited to one future scenario.

"Initially, we are focusing on four industries: government, electronics, aerospace and defense, and oil and gas," says Ruoyi. "The methods we developed can be expanded to analyzing business and society. The expanded service offering will be cross-sector and will cover the impact of future innovation. This novel approach – which uses our mature Business Insights Workbench tool combined with the Web-scale text analytics capabilities of WebFountain, IBM subject matter experts and wide breadth of client experience – makes us well positioned to provide IoFT to the marketplace," says Ruoyi.

Ruoyi says that as R&D departments are forced to "do more with less," the IoFT process can help them make better use of their limited funds. "IBM believes R&D drives 90 percent of new revenue and profitability growth. But in the U.S. the R&D function has a paradox: a critical need for product innovation combined with a shrinking budget. IoFT represents an exciting opportunity to offer clients a new catalog of services that can help improve their R&D effectiveness and efficiency."