Innovation – IBM Study

I am a big believer that innovation is a critical part of any business strategy.  This has come into vogue in the past few years, but I have focused on this ever since I pursued a joint architecture / business education.  One site that I have followed for the past 18 months has been the Business Innovation Factory.  This morning, I was reading several things there, but the IBM CEO Study caught my attention.

1. It talks a lot about innovation from the outside in from customers, business partners, consultants, and trade groups.
2. Innovation is very focused on business model versus product innovation.

“It’s very clear that CEOs today are looking at new kinds of innovation to drive substantial organizational change and business growth,” says Ginni Rometty, Senior Vice President, IBM Enterprise Business Services. “It’s not just about product innovation any more. It’s about understanding how to innovate a business model, or an operational process, or management behavior.”.  View IBM Global CEO Study 2006 Event Presentation.

Another article on the site that appeared in Forbes talks about service industry innovation using traditional product design concepts.  (See article)

All of this is relevant to BPM for two reasons: (1) process innovation is an area of real opportunity for many companies and is akin to business model innovation (just ask all the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies) and (2) there is lots of talk about using BPM to identify exceptions and notice trends that could create new product innovation opportunities.