Extendance: High-Tech Business Experts Blog

Entries from March 2007

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Friday, March 30. 2007

What lies behind IBM's new Innovation Factory?

As we reported yesterday, IBM has opened its own "Innovation Factory," to generate ideas and new products and services for telecom customers. But it’s not exactly a new idea – either for the high-tech world or for IBM.

In his 1985 classic Harvard Business Review article, The Discipline of Innovation, management guru Peter Drucker argued innovation was one-third innovation and two-thirds disciplined hard work that should be planned and managed systematically in companies. The life sciences started using the name “innovation factory” in 1999. After another Harvard Business Review article in 2001, Building an Innovation Factory describing how to spread innovation collaboration between partners, it started to catch on more widely.

IBM was already a member of the Rhode Island-based "Business Innovation Factory", taking over management of the Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Pilot Project in the fall of 2005. They are presumably leveraging this experience – e.g. piloting social networking tools – in the new venture.

The wider need in the telecoms industry was shown in IBM's worldwide survey of high-tech CEOs. The majority of the 700-plus CEOs said depended mostly on generating new business models to gain a business lead. Telecoms CEOs put the emphasis instead on product and service innovation. IBM found this a paradox, because in their view business model innovation generates faster-than-average margin growth, and technology differences are often slim. In comparison with other CEOs, telecoms CEOs also downplayed their role in spearheading innovation. IBM put this down to the urgent need for telecoms businesses to monetize their high capital investment in next-generation services over IP. The survey concludes they are not collaborating externally nearly as much as they need to - a need that the CEOs actually acknowledge.

The survey looks like a top-class piece of market research, giving IBM reason to expect a good takeup, with clear business benefits: product time-to-market and business model innovation through participation of top level management. Mike Hill, IBM’s Telecommunications Industry general manager, says in the PR:

"Our telecom clients are facing a host of competitive pressures that demand the ability to drive new revenue streams, test new business models, and accelerate the pace of innovation”.

I’m sure it was only coincidence, but the PR came out just a day after the US's slip from first to seventh place in

WEF's “networked readiness index” - measuring national ICT resources and preparedness (behind Singapore, most of Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland). A good time to get some positive press!

Posted by Adrian McDermott at 21:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thursday, March 29. 2007

IBM opens "Innovation Factory" - a virtual high-tech market place

Today IBM announced a software platform that is supposed to work as an online market space for high-tech companies. The project is called Innovation Factory. This is what IBM says in a press release today at the US largest wireless industry event - the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, Florida:

Innovation Factory uses a blend of Web 2.0 social networking technologies to help companies rapidly conceive and test new products and services, accelerating a launch process that often takes years down to mere days.

Posted by Ralf Haller at 13:45 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Wednesday, March 28. 2007

Otto - a German online sales success story

We have already reported about Otto being the second largest online sales company in the world, right after celebrity Amazon. For the fiscal year ending February 28, 2007 they had a 33% increase in online sales, exceeding a staggering 4 bln EUR, of which Germany alone accounted for 2.8 bln EUR. Germany is a big market success for eBay, too. There must be something special about the Germans that makes them such eager online shoppers.

Posted by Ralf Haller in ICT Tech/Market News at 13:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Monday, March 26. 2007

US star wars games with Eutelsat satellite

This weekend news surfaced that end of January a European news satellite was jammed by strong terrestrial signals (these sources say it was done by the US military), shutting down the news distribution of the Swiss news agency SDA, and also the French AFP, for about 24hours.

We are good sports so put this news into the category of "tech fun", although I am not sure if the US would see it the same way if a European country were to take out one of their satellites by accident. Questions as to the quality of their personnel and decision making processes are now coming up, of course, and seem to be justified.

Posted by Ralf Haller in Tech Fun at 10:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Sunday, March 25. 2007

Ericsson on track in 2006

The world's largest mobile network infrastructure equipment vendor announced its 2006 Annual Report. Both revenues (+15%) and operating income were up from a year ago.

It seems obvious that Ericsson's strategy of concentrating on networks as a whole (both fixed and wireless) and services, as well as a strong fiscal year at SonyEricsson - the mobile phone JV - has contributed to this increase. At the same time major rivals Siemens and Alcatel were busy with their mergers while Motorola lost momentum. The years 2007 and 2008 will be interesting to watch though, as the joint ventures of its rivals shape up and new entrants in the mobile phone market with Apple could start hurting. Last but not least, will the 4G battle between LTE and WiMAX start to be played out in the market - here Ericsson has put all its bets on the relatively complex and expensive LTE.

Posted by Ralf Haller in ICT Tech/Market News at 16:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Friday, March 23. 2007

Gadget of the Week - LG Shine

LG has managed so far to stay out of the spotlight in the mobile phone markets. While they come up with nice phones here and there (LG Chocolate e.g.) they are a long way from their S. Korean rival Samsung in terms of market share.

As with the Chocolate phone, with this new phone LG started with the looks. Shine - as its name implies - is a shiny phone with a metallic finish. As their TV commercials hint, it is for the ladies who like it when they turn heads. So if you are looking for a nice gift for your wife or girlfriend (and don't believe the head-turning part of LG's commercials) then this could be a good choice. I still have the urge to check out the features of the phone but - actually - do they matter for such a phone at all?