Side bar: Innovation beyond your four walls
The idea of simply doing innovation within your four walls is dead, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen told an audience at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. 'The challenge is not whether you have the capabilities within your four walls but if you can marry those capabilities with people from the outside.'
Frost & Sullivan MD & partner for APAC Manoj Menon agrees. 'Companies that limit innovation to come from within their organization will become redundant.' The growth of the internet and web 2.0 has opened a completely new paradigm for innovation in the global marketplace, which has accelerated the pace by making customers an active part of the process.
'The most successful companies, the companies that create tremendous value, have leveraged this power of co-creation very effectively,?says Singapore-based Menon.
'In the past we relied on the R&D teams in organizations to power the innovation. These teams had access to the most sophisticated technology and information, which enabled them to be the select few to drive this innovation process,' he explained.
'Today computing capabilities as well as the information is widely available to everyone globally. This allows everyone to participate in the process.'
Menon says companies are no longer limited by the few engineers they employ, as they are able to leverage the global marketplace for new ideas. 'Successful companies will be those that offer platforms for their partners and customers to play, participate and personalize their experiences. The idea generation will happen at a much larger scale and in turn make the companies more successful.'
Scribd CEO Trip Adler told the same MWC audience that the need to be more connected and source innovation externally is vital to a company's pipeline. (Scribd is a document-sharing website for posting documents in various formats and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format.)