Innovation as the Fuel of Commercial Success

Abstract

Innovation is an essential part of lasting growth and profitability in business. Bringing new ideas to market requires companies to be innovative, a quality that has become a challenging proposition due to the pressing need for lower investment risk and shorter product lifecycles, as well as the untrammelled globalization of the economy. Cooperating with partners along an interactive value chain is becoming an increasingly important response to this challenge. Working as communities across the boundaries of disciplines on the (further) development of products and solutions or on shared business models allows companies to spread risks and use synergies in their ecosystems. For each actor to become more agile in that ecosystem, companies need to open up their in-house innovation processes (open innovation), turning the ecosystem around them into a shared frame of reference for their innovation activities along the value chain (e.g. with suppliers, technology partners, clients, or academic research institutions). It is usually up to their IT service organizations to coordinate this complex interplay of different actors and to aggregate the results of this shared work, so as to turn them into scalable and successful innovations that can be brought to market.