Following is a summary of the speech I delivered in ITRU Symposium 2012 conducted by University of Moratuwa IT Faculty.
Research
carries an enormous potential in bringing a new dimension of thinking into a
software production house. On the other hand, innovation happens in a knowledge-based
business even without the name board of ‘research’. Regular customer project
work contextualizes teams into paradigms where innovation is driven by focused
effort and business pressure. Despite of the ostensible limitedness, most of
these innovations carry with them elements that can well be functional in
entirely different contexts. One duty for a corporate research team is to
capture and systematize ad hoc innovations happening throughout an
organization. In other words, research teams provide muscle power to workout
the collective unconscious in companies.
One
prominent challenge for free trade in markets is the tendency of old style
companies to generate vendor lock-ins while blocking rivals. Despite of
short-term gains this practice has proven to be detrimental for organizations
as it discourages innovation and promotes protecting yesterdays’ products and
business models. Consequently, products that inflicted lock-ins evolved at a glacial
pase, literally making them soft spots to be crushed by rival insurgents that
generate disruptively new kinds of values in oppose to small increments of
existing values. Smarter players lean towards every option that make their
technologies obsolete as quickly as possible because it is the only sustainable
way of triggering fast evolution of products through constant experimentation.
Research teams engage in making an organizations’ own technologies obsolete and
open for competitors to challenge so that product teams are prompted to keep
momentum in bettering their outputs.
Twentieth
century businesses focused on producing goods and services effectively and
reaching consumers aggressively with push marketing. Consumer experience did
not often enjoy a great deal of attention from producers. Intervention of
modern information technology has turned this picture by many degrees so that
even the giant companies are no more insulated from the effects of individual
consumer product experience. Conditions are set for companies to start worrying
about creating authentic value for people rather than generating awareness
through mass marketing. Research teams provide infrastructure to product teams
to enable them in turning great outputs (products) into great outcomes
(betters). This effectively creates platforms where organizations can build
value conversations with consumers in oppose to old school
‘take-it-or-leave-it’ value propositions. Results are shorter value cycles that
induce renewal of organizational resources via its user base: A hallmark in
most twenty first century insurgents.
Today
smarter players are consistently proving that the traditional practice of
squeezing suppliers to make maximum profits is no more sustainable. Generating
authentic customer value needs investing on suppliers, ultimately fuelling
better kinds of resources flowing through value cycles, expanding the pie for
everyone. Identifying this is instrumental for a supplier that plays in the
value generation business for end user software producers. When software
product companies turn into their suppliers with compassion, the suppliers
themselves should be ready with research teams equipped with correct
philosophies and tools. Wherever harmony is reached, traditional outsourcing
businesses are turned into high value generating, interdependent bodies.
