Assemblers do better than innovators?
After a long absence trying to get back to posting: something interesting on Service Oriented Architectures but particular on the benefits of innovation to companies. Industrial motivations for joining European Projects anybody?
posted by steve at 2:46 pm
|
3 Comments:
Britain's Cable & Wireless, a global telecoms network operator, did almost no R&D, and always relied on the manufacturers of telecoms equipment from whom they bought to do research . C&W are now fallen on hard times, unlike their R&D-intense rivals, British Telecom, about to deploy the world's most innovative network platform.
I think relying on your suppliers for innovation is very short-sighted as a strategy, and puts your company's new features at the mercy of other company's decisions.
-- Peter
That's true - but I wonder how much of the change in fortunes was due to innovation. I.e. what were the innovations BT leveraged and how to do better than C&W. Clearly it provided another potential revenue stream and possibly quicker rollout of new solutions but it would be hard to calculate the cost offset for the years of research.
Not that I wouldn't prefer to believe that firms should innovate! :)
On the other hand I thought Dell - the quintessential assembler - do no research whatsoever but were doing rather well last time I checked.
I wish I could agree with Peter but most of the beans counting officers that are now in charge of most major IT companies seem to think that if a cut needs to be made a cut in R&D is a good one. And who could blame them when their own returns and performances are valued on a 1, 2, or 3 year max timespan? Most CFOs only concern is how many cents they are beating the consensus in their EPS...
Solid R&D is for the long term success of the company. Sadly much of the the emphasis seems to be on short term results at present.
-Alessio
Post a Comment
<< Home