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I recently read 2 articles on innovation outsourcing; the first one by Stephanie Overby on CIO Magazine’s blog and the other one by Mark Hillary on his blog.
I am focusing my efforts on small to mid-size American software companies, and our marketing message to them is that we want to become their partner for innovation.
So needless to say, these posts got my undivided attention!
First and foremost, let me say that it seems like a very questionable move to fully outsource innovation. If a company has lost its ability to innovate, I do not see how would outsourcing improve the situation. In addition, I do not believe it is the role of an outsourcing/BPO provider to innovate in lieu of their clients.
It reminds me a comment from Bill Homa, CIO of Hannaford Bros., which I read some months ago in CIO magazine. “If you are outsourcing a problem, it will still be a problem.” How true!
Hillary talks about an initiative from TCS (Tata Consulting Services) in the UK. I understand from his article that this initiative has not produced any visible output so far.
The way I understand being partner in innovation is quite different, and it is to provide our customers with all the required instrumentation and organization that will enable them to focus on and therefore accelerate innovation; in other words, to create the conditions to “commoditize” the process of creating products from their ideas and concepts.
I might elaborate on our recipe in another post, but our measure of success is our customer’s ability to innovate faster and better.
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