UtilitiesProject.com
Title
The Utilities Project
Description
Innovation is the key to transformation and ultimately, a necessary part of successful business growth. To build a deeper understanding of the role of innovation in business, IBM recently released the Global CEO Study 2006, based on interviews with more than 700 CEOs and business leaders across all major industries in the United States, Europe and Asia. To provide a consistent framework for the respondents, we defined innovation as “new ideas or current thinking applied in fundamentally different ways, resulting in significant change.”
Our study produced some interesting and in some cases surprising findings. One is that competitive pressures have pushed business model innovation much higher on executive priority lists than expected, although its importance does not eliminate the need to focus on products, services and markets as well as on operational innovation. Another finding is that executives view collaborative innovation to be critical – and that collaboration beyond company walls is particularly important, with business partners and customers cited as top sources of innovative ideas. Finally, executives acknowledged their primary responsibility for fostering innovation and the need to orchestrate innovation by creating a more team-based environment, rewarding individual innovators and integrating business and technology more effectively.
While the views of utility executives may vary somewhat from these cross-industry findings, they are likely to agree that innovation will be critical as utility companies continue to move beyond the challenges of the last few years to pursue growth. So what are the most critical innovation issues for utilities?
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