Good piece in the Times today about the pace of innovation and the cost of keeping up, even for large companies. A couple key quotes:
At the General Motors Corporation , research spending has stayed about the same in recent years, but Lawrence F. Burns, vice president for research and development and planning, said he has achieved better results by working with knowledgeable (and less expensive) researchers in China, India, Israel and Russia. Sharing is also a virtue, as in the research lab G.M. owns with the Boeing Company and the Raytheon Company .Lucien P. Hughes, research director for the technology labs at Accenture , the consulting company, agreed that alliances in research are now the norm.
"The days of the large-scale insular lab - not talking to the rest of the world - I think are over for now," he said.
Finding the technology - either through internal ingenuity, outsourcing or acquisition - is only the beginning. For a time-honored company, breakthrough technologies can be as disruptive inside the company as they are externally. Too many companies are not structurally prepared to handle them, said Professor Roberts of M.I.T.
"It's not all a question of a willingness to spend," he said. "It's a willingness to participate."
Yes, it is a simple fact that you cannot employ most of the talent in the world. In fact, you can afford to employ only a fraction of the best talent, just as any baseball team can afford only a few stars. Amidst the prosperity of the late 20th century, when the basic services available in advanced economies are sufficient to support widespread risk-taking, people are able to undertake entrepreneurial ventures as an alternative to regular employment. Yet, paradoxically, many families must undertake second or third jobs to provide a sufficient income. Both these trends point to the end of single-job workforces, a society where connections are forged by semi-free agent workers to bridge companies and industries through the exercise of plural talents. To attract and retain these liberated workers, companies will have to be heard and have a fulfilling role in corporate life and governance.
An organizational model that supports these new workers will combine the features of a partnership and a polity, an organized group under a consensual form of governance. It will also invite the customer into the governance of the companies that serve them, increasing dialogue with the market to provide vastly improved efficiency in reaching an optimal social outcome. This form of economic collaboration is sufficiently flexible to acknowledge a wider range of costs and benefits than a bottom-line oriented business. It allows investments to support social and economic goals based on a deliberative process, as evidenced by the appearance of social investing, collective ownership arrangements, and non-governmental organizations, which are treated as the equals of government in international venues. As companies expand beyond the borders of individual nations or as networks of independent workers form transnational partnerships, the emergent polity business model will facilitate an environment of dialogue and decision-making that incorporates broadly defined goals and criteria for success. The realization that society is information-dependent (as it has always been, though previous forms of critical information were mythical, religious or related to fungible resources) will radically alter the idea of the organization, forcing open the boundaries the corporation to bring ideas and analysis to bear from many sources that cannot be permanently employed.