Chapter 8. IBM's Global Technology Outlook and Its Implications to Consumer Electronics
Innovation is the lifeblood of the electronics industry. It pulses with new ideas and new products such as FAX, the PC, the MP3 player, the mobile phone, and many infrastructure innovations, some of which fundamentally change the way people live, work, and play. Innovation occurs at the intersection of invention and business insight—in a fusion of new developments and new approaches to solve problems.
How the Global Technology Outlook is Prepared
IBM's research division conducts an annual GTO in addition to, but often feeding into, its ongoing cycle of strategy and planning. The process starts in March each year by them selecting a core production team and representatives from each of IBM's eight Research labs to work on it. A call for topics is issued to the IBM research community, which is the largest and most prolific IT industrial research community in the world and which is largely responsible for IBM receiving the most US patents (a record 3,248 in 2004) already for the twelfth consecutive year.
The call for GTO topics typically generates about 100 topics that are related to IBM's current or future businesses opportunities. They have a technical basis and cover a timeframe of about three to five years, although some technology topics may look further ahead. The topics include technology and business trends and disruptive changes that people think are likely to happen. They are all presented to the core team, lab representatives, and the research senior vice president. Similar ideas are clustered into single topics, and the best of them all are selected for further studies.
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