Innovation has always been one of the core stories in technology communications. It's interesting to see, though, how the public discourses about innovation evolved over the last decade. Without being very scientific about it, it seems to me that we can differentiate between the following perspectives.
In the late nineties, innovation was mostly about new technology features, almost as if they were ends in themselves. Simply being new was often good enough, in particular for Internet technologies. They all carried the promise of getting a piece of the "new economy" pie. It was all about growth, and there was enough money around to drive it, almost at any price. Business plans built on innovative technologies could attract millions, even if a profit was ten years out. You just had to quickly build a brand and then cash in when you went public. It worked for a few, but we know how it ended for most.
After the bubble burst, the belief in growth was quickly replaced by the belief in profit. As a result, talking about innovation had to go beyond technology features, it had to be about business value. Innovation became less revolutionary and more evolutionary, and ROI became one of the most quoted acronyms. The patience of investors was gone, innovations had to pay off soon, with the measure being the bottom line, not just the hope to attract new capital.
Under higher pressure to be more profitable, organizations were also increasingly looking to outsource activities outside of their core business. While the concept of outsourcing had been around since the eighties, it now increasingly went across national boundaries: outsourcing often turned into offshoring. Around the US elections in 2004, it appeared how this development put innovation on the public agenda in a new way. The impact of offshoring on the domestic workforce had become a political issue, in particular since it also started to include some white collar work. Against this background, innovation almost became the white knight to save the margins of the developed world. While there was no way to compete with the cheap labor in developing countries when it came to standardized business procedures, developed countries hoped - and still hope - to keep their edge in innovative areas. Economies driven by innovation are able to escape the pressure of commoditization and keep the margins high as a result.
However, it seems as though we are just about to discover yet another meaning of innovation. When I traveled through China and India a couple of months ago, I was stunned by some of the innovations you can find there as well. E.g. at an executive dinner set up by our New Delhi office, I met with a gentleman by the name of Raja SV, the Chief Human Resources Officer of Quatrro, a new Indian company for BPO solutions. They are far from being just another shop for standard business processes. Quatrro rather looks like a blend of service provider, management consultancy, business partner and investor. They certainly take an innovative look at what BPO can do. Of course, I realize that the innovations I saw were merely anecdotal evidence. So, I was happy to discover that some innovation experts have looked into this more systematically. In response to a Business Week double issue on China and India back in August, John Hagel pointed out that these rapidly growing economies are often underestimated when it comes to innovation. He provides interesting examples of innovation patterns that are specific to these countries. They are focused on new models of distribution, process management and production. Hagel has also written a book on this topic, co-authored by John Seely Brown. Obviously, innovation is not a privilege of the developed world anymore, even if the innovation patterns in the developing countries seem to be different. As a result, enterprises that want to be successful in this environment will increasingly have to integrate global sources of innovation - and the communications about them.
Georg Kolb
Technorati tags: Innovation, China, India, PR
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