Harvard pointers on global innovators

Corporate R&D labs used to be the key for companies to create competitive advantage.

But now innovation is moving across the globe.

That’s why Harvard Business School professor, Alan MacCormack, believes that a real source of competitive advantage is skill in managing innovation partnerships.

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 IP 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 strategy aligned to their business needs. They also organize for effective collaboration and invest in building collaborative capabilities.

Previously many companies secured competitive advantage by investing in internal R&D.

But today “not invented here” is becoming a badge of honor…and a source of competitive advantage.  

To design the 787 “Dreamliner” (initial flight in 2008) Boeing lashed together 50 partners in 130 locations. These firms aren’t just manufacturing partners – they design the components they make. “Boeing’s source of competitive advantage is shifting – its unique assets and the way it orchestrates, manages, and coordinates its network of hundreds of global partners.” 

Go to Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage. Source: Harvard Business School, via Superfactory.