Game Changers in ICT: What drives your innovation?
Authors: Vladimir Blagojević, Wim Codenie, Jeroen Deleu
Contact person: Vladimir Blagojević
This is the first in the series of articles about the major “game changers” in ICT. It sets the scene by introducing the 3 prototypical ICT company “personas”: The Builder, The Technologist, and The Consultant. Each of them has specific innovation drivers of their R&D activities. The “game changers” and their impact on each of the personas will be described in the next article.
The Builder: ICT-intensive Product Builders
These companies develop and market products using ICT technologies (e.g. software, sensors, communication…), either in B2B or B2C markets. They typically initiate their R&D activities driven by either product innovation (improvement of product performance, innovative features) or process innovation (new methods for product development and production).
The Builder Example: a fast growing company bringing a CAD product in a B2B market. To sustain its growth, The Builder has initially focused on innovation of its development process: adoption of agile development helped streamline the process and achieve repeatable delivery. Once established in the market, it faced fierce competition. The Builder responded by shifting its strategy and R&D focus to product differentiation by improvements of product usability and thus far unprecedented integration with other products commonly used by their customers.
The Technologist: ICT Technology Experts
These companies specialize in delivery of a specific ICT technology. They don’t necessarily develop products, but profile themselves as experts in the technology (e.g. GIS, speech recognition, data mining, sensor technologies…). They often develop a platform that encapsulates the technology and that can be integrated in other ICT products.
R&D of The Technologist is often focused on fundamental research results within its technological domain, and its application to improve the performance of their technology.
The Technologist Example: a university spinoff specialized in promising wireless sensor technologies. It is closely collaborating with its originating university lab performing fundamental research in order to create a cheap sensor for pollution detection with low power consumption.
The Consultant: ICT Service Providers
These companies offer services to other companies to improve their ICT engineering processes or quality of their ICT products, often in a consultancy mode. Examples are suppliers of test solutions, specialists in usability, experts in project management, innovation consultants… Their typical innovation drivers are service differentiation (from competing service providers), service protection (making a service more difficult to copy) and business development (e.g. finding ways to enter new markets).
The Consultant Example: a consultancy company providing project management services for software and IT projects, specialized in Agile development. Faced with commoditization of agile development, The Consultant decided to join an R&D project to develop a new generation of services.
Conclusion
The three company personas frequently form a value chain. The Technologist often sells its platform to the The Builder (to enable their product with its technology, e.g. to enable wireless connectivity). The Consultant most often provides services to The Builder, but sometimes also consults The Technologist. They have very different innovation drivers of their R&D activities (see 2).
Next to these commonplace drivers, new disruptive drivers are emerging that these companies should consider: the “game changers”. These will be described in the next article of this series.
This text was based on material presented at the ITEA/Artemis Co-Symposium 2009 in Madrid. Feel free to contact us if you want to know more about this subject.
September 10, 2010 at 12:41 pm, Game Changers in ICT « Earn Money With ICT said:
[...] is the second article in the series about the major “game changers” in ICT. The previous article introduced the 3 prototypical ICT company “personas” (The Builder, The Technologist, and The [...]