IBM offers a few details of its new consultancy service for R&D management. Pity about the jargon.
The press release from IBM about its R&D "help desk", IBM Launches R&D Consulting Practice, offers a tantalising glimpse of what could be interesting service. After all, the company has been an R&D power house of note. It may have been 20 years ago, but how many companies can boast of winning Nobel prizes two years in a row?
We were a little surprised to read that, according to Melvin Weems, Global Leader for R&D Management in IBM Global Services "CEOs ranked R&D as their eighth source for new ideas, in IBM's 2006 study of over 750 CEOs around the world, which illustrates the challenge companies are experiencing in leveraging R&D investment to drive real innovation and growth."
Eighth?
The rest of the press release offers a few glimpses of what IBM has on offer. For example, it tells us that "IBM consultants utilize a scientific methodology to understand what future technologies may have an impact on a company's product portfolio and provide guidance for how to incorporate future technologies into future products."
That one makes sense. But we balk at such words as "Ideation". It may feature in Google, bit so do a lot of gibberish terms dreamed up in business-speak. The explanation of what they mean by the term makes more sense. "IBM consultants assist clients with the strategies and management systems designed to create and sustain the flow of innovative ideas and to manage these ideas as a portfolio of assets."
Maybe this service can do something about the decline in corporate R&D in the USA. Perhaps with IBM's advice businesses will be able to do more research while spending fewer dollars.
IBM says it plans to roll the service out to Europe "later in the year".
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