Monday morning, 9 o’clock, Tom Schäfer’s office. Tom is responsible for the business unit Corporate Desktop Management: the monthly controlling reports have just arrived. Similar to last month the turnover is stagnating in the product area Desktop Management, an area which has been in Tom’s responsibility for five years now. To start with it was a really successful business, with good growth rates and a solid customer base. But in recent years the turnover has been falling consistently and competition has been getting steadily stronger. It looks as if Tom is not going to reach his turnover targets this year. But how is he meant to achieve strong growth in a competitive and saturated market with standard products such as IT for the workplace? Soberly Tom begins to draft his report for the annual target attainment discussion with the head of marketing.

In IT we often only talk about innovation in connection with the creation of brand new products or the introduction of new technologies. On the innovations radar we find terms such as grid computing, sensor networks or service delivery platform. We have developed efficient methods for creating products out of technologies, for evaluating them financially in business cases and for establishing them in the market place. Here we often forget that the technological environment is changing very quickly and that the IT products may in just a few years no longer be competitive.


A short discourse into IT innovations management


Due to innovation theory and history, technological and market driven innovations are given priority in the case of IT products. However, innovations only partially stem from technological change. A significant – and often neglected – innovative potential lies in process (see Toyota Production System), financial (e.g. Cisco Zero Closing), management (e.g. lean production) and organizational innovations (e.g. Network Organization). It is the Portfolio Manager’s task – Tom in our case – to also take advantage of these types of innovative potential for his service offering.


The tasks in innovations management in IT range from the identification of technological developments through to the realization of innovations in product form (see figure 1). The process always consists of three consecutive steps:


1. Innovation Screening – identification and evaluation of innovative ideas,
Next page