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Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
Friday, October 26th, 2007 | adminby James Davies
What part of the enterprise has not been outsourced? From a Product Lifecycle Management perspective, manufacturing and product design development have been outsourced with largely positive results. In broad strokes, these services have become commoditized – which leaves innovation as the last competitive differentiator. So far so good.
Now fast-forward to today. Only 15% of Global CEOs expect ideas for tomorrow’s winning products to originate from internal R&D organizations. Industry movements, such as customer-centric innovation and open innovation, actually serve to outsource the very aspect of your business upon which your market survival hinges – your ability to innovate!
Now that’s ironic. What’s next? Is the “next” last competitive differentiator not what you innovate, but how you innovate?
June 10th, 2009 at 1:07 am
I think the key here is that the positive is that companies are innovating in new ways, one of those being outsourced innovation where some aspect of the ideation to development lifecycle is performed by a third party. That is not necessarily a negative, a tenet of successful product companies has always been to focus on core competencies. So if ideation into new markets is not a core competency why not outsource that piece.