IBM’s Shift Towards Collaborative Innovation

Steve Hamm wrote an excellent article about IBM’s Innovation Factory. IBM’s chip division was losing a lot of money in 2002-2003, even after a 5$ billion investment three years earlier. To overcome these problems, IBM decided to shift from a closed to a more open and collaborative approach.

The company has built what it calls an ‘open ecosystem’ of chip R&D with nine partners, including Advanced Micro Devices, Sony, Toshiba, Freescale Semiconductor, and Albany Nanotech, a university research center. The result of their collaboration strategy speaks for itself: IBM’s chip operation boomed, and even now, during a cyclical downturn in the chip industry, it’s still making a profit. The concluding section of the article is titled “Motto For the 21st Century: Network or Die.” As more companies are successfully adopting open innovation, innovation networking, collaborative innovation… (what’s in a name?), the pressure is rising on companies that fall behind.

Interested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing? Subscribe to RSS!