I don't want to be flippant or mean to Big Blue here; for gosh sakes I have nothing but respect for a company that has been around as long as IBM has. But sometimes I hear Big Company Executives talk and I am amazed because they appear to just be getting ideas that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have known and practiced for quite a while, and then they announce them like it's all brand spanking new. I read a long interview with the CEO of IBM, a brilliant, dedicated fellow, in Business Week. It's interesting as far as CEO interviews go, but frankly it seems to cover ground that many SMEs have already covered in the collaborative business environment enabled by the Internet. Consider this statement about the usefulness of business model innovation, as opposed to simple product innovation: People realize that you need to do innovative products. You need to have your products differentiated. But with product innovation, it's a certainty that your competition is shortly going to copy what you've done. There was just an announcement that Samsung has a pretty cool way to listen to music as an alternative to the iPod. There will always be the next hot car and the next great high-definition television. But with all of those things, your competition's going to react to what you've just done. It might take them a year or two, but it's inevitable. They will react.
With business-model innovation, though, if you can come up with a unique way of doing things, it's much tougher to react to. The holy grail of strategic thinking is, how do you come up with a business model that differentiates you and that creates value for your customers, and, by doing that, puts you in a unique position in your industry?
Sure, this makes a ton of sense. SMEs have been doing this for the past ten years. Most recently it has been called a Web 2.0 Mashup, where two software services, representing two complimentary business processes are brought together to deliver a unique value proposition, the new whole being greater than the sum of its parts. But this has been going on since the Internet really sprang onto the scene. What's Google? A free search engine joined to a simple AdWords advertising process. An innovative business process model indeed. On the subject of collaboration enabling innovation the CEO says: Our point of view is simple: In today's environment, with all the global opportunities that exist and these new technologies, the best way to make them unique for your own enterprise is to foster collaboration.
Agreed. Been there, been doing that. So much technology that the need for specialization become paramount. Specialists by default must collaborate. So what does it mean when IBM catches the wave that so many SMEs have been riding for so long? It means first that you are on the right track; that some of you are the envy of the big boys; that being big isn't all its knocked up to be unless you are taking the buyout option; that focus and collaboration are now lubricants of the economic engine. Frankly, I would not want to be Oracle, or Microsoft or IBM today. What business are these companies in anymore? Anyone really know?
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