Professor Applegate’s appeal which I’ve cited in my last post is a kind of opener for a study published by Harvard researchers: Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage
The executive summary of this article says: Collaboration is becoming a new and important source of competitive advantage. No longer is the creation and pursuit of new ideas the bastion of large, central R&D departments within vertically integrated organizations. Instead, innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected according to their comparative advantages, and operating in a coordinated manner.
That this trend isn’t just the product of an academic study is – as if this would be necessary – being “proofed” by a recent article in the Business Week: IBM is reinventing the way it innovates. At one time the tech giant was a true believer in go-it-alone R&D. The feeling was that if a technology wasn’t invented by IBMers, it wasn’t as good. Now the computer pioneer realizes that no matter how big an organization is, more smart people are going to work outside its walls than inside. So it courts R&D partners aggressively. “We are the most innovative when we collaborate,” declares Chief Executive Samuel J. Palmisano.
