Great companies were once known by the inventions developed in their R&D centers such as AT&T Bell Labs, IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and Xerox PARC.
But in today’s world, where innovators, designers, and powerful production partners are scattered across the globe, it’s less important for companies to rely on home-grown products, says Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack and his research partners in a new working paper, Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.
Fact is, the new skill you need today is the ability to identify, coordinate, and manage a group of far-flung vendors, partners, and manufacturing resources to help you think up and create new products.
Take Boeing. To create a new aircraft even just a few years ago, Boeing would turn to its flotilla of engineers to design the craft, manufacturers to make the parts, and assemblers to fit it all together. But when Boeing dreamed up the now-under-construction Dreamliner, it chose instead to coordinate the efforts of 50 partners in 130 locations. Says MacCormack in an interview on his work:
“In our view, Boeing’s source of competitive advantage is shifting; it is less and less related to the possession of deep individual technical skills in hundreds of diverse disciplines.”
The research on best practices of global innovators reveals:
- Innovation is increasingly driven through collaborative teams due to product complexity, availability of a low-cost but highly skilled labor pool, and advances in development tools.
- Collaboration adds to the top and bottom lines by shortening development lead times, increasing capacity, and facilitating access to skills, capabilities, and intellectual property that a firm does not possess internally.
- Many efforts at innovation collaboration fail because they begin with the goal of lowering costs.
- Successful collaboration programs develop a collaboration strategy that is aligned to their business needs. They also organize for effective collaboration and invest in building collaborative capabilities.
Do you think the best ideas are not your own? How do you find them?
