Innovation & technology

Do your innovations create value for customers - or just novelty?

Seventy percent of US CEOs are anticipating changes to their innovation capabilities. The definition of innovation has widened to include not only R&D that underpins new technologies, products and services but also business processes and business models. Each aspect of the business is fair game for reinvention, and CEOs are leading innovation on multiple fronts.

For example, some companies are commercializing new technologies on a large scale in fast-growing markets that have “leapfrogged” costly legacy infrastructures; think smart grids and mobile health solutions. Others are leading low-cost innovations for price-conscious consumers overseas and bringing those product and process discoveries back to their home markets.

 

Featured innovation & technology insights

 

CIO leadership in post-transaction relationships: IT’s role in customer engagement

By evolving IT to focus on the end customer, CIOs have the opportunity to be key partners in helping their businesses break new ground.

 

The Thing Stack: Technologies that guide customers to their goals

Emerging technologies continue to bring down the cost and complexity of adding networked sensors to products and services, accelerating their integration and driving new customer value....

 

Internet of Things: Evolving transactions into relationships

This issue of the Technology Forecast examines the impact of Internet of Things trends on businesses and the IT organization. It analyzes how businesses now have the ability to continue the relationship with customers after the sales transaction by helping them achieve the goals for which they buy the products.

 

Enabling the end-to-end retail experience

Dominic Morea of First Data shares how the future of the retail industry is going beyond the transaction.

 

Digitizing product use

Jim Ingrassia of Konica-Minolta shares how digitizing the use of its products was a source of competitive advantage.

 

Creating the health feed

Walter De Brouwer of Scanadu forecasts how advances in sensing will give access to our personal health feed and transform healthcare.

 

Becoming a service company

Macario Namie of Jasper Wireless explains how to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunities.

 

Aligning customer and enterprise goals

Fred Cripe shares how Internet of things will shift the insurance business from loss compensation to loss control by helping customers achieve their goals.

 

Augmenting reality

Daan Roosegaarde, an artist and an innovator, shares the importance of merging physical and digital realities into seamless, intuitive experiences.

 

Using technology to help customers achieve their goals

Businesses that embed capabilities to understand usage in their products in service of customers’ goals stand to reap unparalleled value.

 

Cities of Opportunity: Analysis and forecast of global urban economic centers: PwC

Download the 2012 edition of PwC’s Cities of Opportunity. This year’s report, our fifth, analyses in depth the trajectory of 27 capitals of finance, commerce, manufacturing and/or culture across 60 variables -- and offers insight into what factors and conditions make cities function best, plus customized, interactive tools for exploring the data.

 

APEC 2012 CEO Summit survey report: Addressing challenges. Expanding possibilities.

PwC's report, building on a survey of more than 370 business leaders and interviews from across the region, confirms the necessity of regional cooperation for our companies' futures.

 

APEC 2012 CEO Summit: Improving supply chain integration to make them more reliable

One of the challenges for the continued economic growth of the APEC territories, are integrated supply chains that are reliable. Removing key trade bottle necks will facilitate faster, less expensive, and more secure intra-APEC trade.

 

APEC 2012 CEO Summit: APEC's path to green growth

A global market for green goods and services offers benefits of prosperity and job creation. PwC's report offers CEO insights on this and other topics.

 

Creating a platform

Laura Merling and John Musser of Alcatel-Lucent share how enterprises can use APIs to create platforms from existing assets to unlock new value.

 

Users as partners

Brian Katz of Sanofi discusses how consumerization of IT means enterprise IT should treat users as partners.

 

APIs: An architecture for speed at AT&T

John Donovan, Sanjay Macwan and Jacob Feinstein of AT&T detail how the API program is a driver of speed in their innovation efforts.

 

The digital indirect channel

Why APIs are of strategic importance to all businesses: Technology forecast: PwC

 

The rising value of linked information

Mark Noworolski and Peter Leiser of Streetline detail how they are transforming the parking ecosystem with cloud, mobility, and analytics technologies using RESTful APIs.

 

Getting into the customer’s context

Devon Biondi of Mashery details how APIs allow businesses to engage with customers in their context.

 

Closing the loop on sustainability information

We’ve identified four key emerging information technology areas that directly affect enterprise sustainability. These areas span the lifecycle of information—from where it is created to where it is reported.

 

How does one tax the cloud?

From a tax perspective, client service professionals must stay informed about potential changes in state tax policies regarding the tax treatment of the various cloud computing platforms.

 

Raising your digital IQ: PwC's 4th Annual Digital IQ Survey

The 4th Annual Digital IQ Survey includes respondents from nearly 500 US companies about the current state of their technology-related activities and plans for the future.

 

Medical innovation

The way we assess value in medical technology is changing radically. Payers are refusing to pay for incremental innovations that do not significantly improve health or reduce cost.

 

Protecting your brand in the cloud: Transparency and trust through enhanced reporting

Cloud computing is making deep inroads into the marketplace, but organizations are concerned about risks regarding security, privacy, availability, data protection and retention. Any one of these could damage a company’s business and its brand. How can the risks impact companies’ brands and how can third-party assurance provide a solution?

 

WSJ CEO Council: New approaches to global health

Improving health conditions and offering greater access to care around the world will require a new set of tools, including public-private partnerships, emerging technologies and evolving regulation.

 

WSJ CEO Council: Encouraging and protecting business innovation

From the education of global talent pools, to national immigration policies, regulation and international intellectual property protections, the public policy issues on the new innovation landscape are abundant and complex.

 

10Minutes on the boardroom agenda

In this short report, PwC discusses new governance regulations, new risks, and issues of executive compensation and succession planning.

 

Sustainability: Moving from compliance to leadership

Sustainability is moving from “something that’s nice to have” to one of the most important strategic initiatives enterprises will undertake in the coming decade—a practice deeply embedded in the organization.

 

Transforming energy value chains for sustainability

Pat House, SVP for strategy at C3, discusses how volatile energy costs and stakeholder pressures are creating a new mandate to make energy and emissions optimization a top management priority.

 

Raising awareness with energy management

SunGard sustainability director Ryan Whisnant details his company’s deep and longstanding commitment to sustainability, and its many benefits—from improving competitiveness and reducing risk to being a good corporate citizen.

 

Tapping information to drive sustainability

In this interview, Peter Graf, SAP’s chief sustainability officer, explains how sustainability is about long-term business models, and details what CIOs can do to give their organizations an edge.

 

Systematizing sustainability

In this interview, David Kepler, who leads both Dow Chemical’s IT and sustainability functions, discusses how Dow synthesizes the metrics that integrate environmental and social concerns with economic value and strategy.

 

The CIO’s next leadership opportunity: Sustainability

CIOs can demonstrate natural leadership with sustainability—by surfacing information that can educate, motivate, and catalyze decision-making, and by using metrics and other IT tools to embed sustainability practices throughout the organization.

 

Managing energy for sustainability

In this fascinating interview, Amit Chatterjee and Michael Gelobter of Hama Software demonstrate how optimizing energy expense can be a transformational force that can shape your business toward sustainability.

 

Embedding sustainability into everyday actions

In this interview, Intel IT director Chris Peters discusses how Intel is greening its data center and focusing on transitioning sustainability from a program to a mind-set.

 

The CIO’s role in social enterprise strategy

Social technology offers considerable promise, but CIOs and business units are struggling to figure out how to use it effectively. A key reason is that most social media outside the enterprise is just pure communication. Making the same use of these tools inside the enterprise only imposes more channels on already overwhelmed staff. What alternatives exist to help alleviate communications overload?

 

Enterprise success with emerging social technology

Mention social technology or social networking, and most people think of consumer-driven applications such as Twitter or Facebook. But some organizations realize that Facebook, Twitter, and their secured equivalents inside the enterprise are just a catalyst for deeper changes that must be made to collaboration tools and methods. So what are the changes companies need to make to improve things?

 

Harnessing the power of the graph

Keith Griffin is lead architect for Cisco Systems' enterprise collaboration platform business unit. In this interview he talks about how emerging social and graph data technology can remove barriers to more effective collaboration.

 

Building a new learning environment around social tools

Tony O’Driscoll is executive director, Center for Technology, Entertainment and Media, Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His business background includes previous leadership positions in the strategy and change consulting practice at IBM Global Services and at Nortel Networks. His most recent book, Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration, which he co-authored with Karl M. Kapp, was published in 2010. Here he aligns social technology’s strengths with the way people learn today.

 

Adding social networking to business workflow

In this interview, Tim Young of Socialcast considers how blending activity streams with existing applications can open the door to behavioral change inside enterprises.

 

Why collaboration hasn’t changed much—yet

What are the essentials that still need to emerge to create real improvements in enterprise collaboration? Recently retired PwC chief innovation officer Sheldon Laube focuses on the challenges of collaboration — especially as teams get larger and more distributed — and offers some ideas for solution.

 

Enterprise success with emerging social technology

Sameer Patel of Sovos Group places social technology in the context of software that enterprises already use. In this interview, he outlines some of the more recent challenges companies have been facing on the collaboration front. "The true value of enterprise social computing will come from bringing data, content, and people together in the context of business activities," he says.

 

The anytime, anywhere business opportunity

No longer viewed as a strictly consumer phenomenon, smart devices enabled by wireless data networks are getting down to business. Companies operating within all kinds of value chains are embracing them to improve processes, enhance collaboration, and reduce costs. But those benefits are only the beginning. Where do the real payoffs come from for companies using them?

 

Making over healthcare

While there’s still a great deal of uncertainty around the specifics of healthcare reform, one thing’s clear: The healthcare industry in the US will never be the same. And 2011 is shaping up to be a makeover year for healthcare providers, health insurers, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, and employers. But what are the most significant issues in play? A recent report identifies six.

 

The technology powering business mobility

Operating systems, devices, wireless networks, and other IT components all comprise business mobility. But the real power lies in the convergence of the technologies and in how each organization applies them to redefine the way it works. While the chief information officer will lead the charge here, it's important that the rest of the leadership team understand the choices and issues that pertain to the following technology building blocks.

 

Striking the innovation balance

History is littered with companies that have failed to innovate, but innovation is now climbing to the top of the CEO agenda as a primary strategy for achieving profitable growth in a post-crisis economy. Is your company innovating to its full potential -- and what are the tensions that most affect a company’s ability to innovate successfully?

 

Measuring innovation

What is innovation? And how do you measure and benchmark it in your organization, be it private, public or academic?

 

Rebooting Your IT Strategy: Using IT to Accelerate Your Business

A review of IT organizations in financial services and discussions with bank CIOs reveal that firms benefit when their IT organizations innovate and are aligned with their business groups.

 

Building a business case for your global sourcing strategy. Benefits of a data driven approach.

What does a proper business case look like and what should you be doing to avoid the pitfalls? Where do you begin, and why is a comprehensive, fact-based evaluation of the organization and rigorous due diligence on the global sourcing alternatives available so important? Here, we guide you through the answers to these questions.

 

Seeding innovation at Chubb

In this interview, Jon Bidwell and Patrick Sullivan of Chubb detail how transparency of ideas and creating new capability by combining existing modular and discrete functionality is allowing IT to drive innovation at Chubb.

 

Managing innovation from concept to cash

How do openness and social software features create opportunities for IT to innovate? In this interview, Matthew Greeley of Brightidea discusses how CIOs can enable innovation by focusing on the end-to-end process from concept to cash and opening up data and other IT capabilities.

 

Systematizing innovation

In this interview, Bill Hessler of Equipois shares his experience of using a structured innovation method supported by semantic knowledge search capabilities to solve problems in innovation processes.

 

Building an IT innovation platform

In this interview, Paul McCusker of AES describes how digitizing the safety near-miss reporting process using emerging technologies is allowing IT at AES to drive innovation globally. What can your company learn from his example?

 

Systematic problem solving

James Todhunter of Invention Machine shares how systematic methods for problem solving and knowledge management can help enterprises sustain innovation. He details how the Invention Machine Goldfire software blends innovation methods and semantic knowledge capabilities to provide problem-solving support during the innovation process.

 

How business innovation happens: Technology forecast: PwC

Is radical innovation conceived in a single, stunning act of invention and delivered as an entirely new offering? No. Innovation is a process that taps into genius, but it need not be the accidental province of the madly brilliant. Here we look at how organizations can develop, manage, and continually improve an end-to-end process, supported by technology, in which innovations are more likely to be discovered, better assessed, and better converted into profits—what PwC calls the idea-to-cash process.

 

The strategic CIO’s new role in innovation

Innovation is the next frontier for all CIOs, and now is the time for the CIO to prepare and take action. What is your CIO doing to get in the game?

 

Anticipating the next phase of enterprise mobility

How are handhelds influencing enterprise computing overall? In this interview, Srini Koushik of Nationwide ponders the state of mobile security, sheds light on Nationwide’s broad mobile constituency, and considers where new interface modes may open new application opportunities.

 

The new power of the cybernetic employee

The enterprise workforce is really a cybernetic system, with workers becoming inseparable from the devices and the personalized information clouds they bring with them. How should enterprises adapt to accommodate these cybernauts? Mark Pesce of FutureSt Consulting offers his take on how work gets done differently in the new mobile enterprise.

 

Blending work and life on smartphones

Todd Schofield of Standard Chartered makes enterprise application platforms from consumer smartphones. In this interview, he outlines the bank’s innovative approach to standardizing on an application-centric smartphone platform, and he describes how smart handhelds have opened new vistas for enterprise applications.

 

Getting to your best mobile strategy

Tom Conophy of InterContinental Hotels Group describes the importance of a sound cultural and management foundation for mobile innovation.Here he debunks the notion that too many CIOs have their hands tied when it comes to innovation, and he uses the example of the mobile applications evolution to make his point.

 

Turning handheld power into enterprise clout

The smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices your employees already own are productivity drivers. Here's how you can seize the opportunity.

 

How to exert leadership on enterprise mobility

PwC outlines some best practices for a sound enterprise mobility strategy.

 

Mobile technology’s journey from peril to promise

Once viewed as an oddity to be kept at arm’s length, mobile devices are now seen as a potentially powerful platform for enterprise value. PwC sorts out the drivers, and the ramifications, of this sea change.

 

Cloud computing gets strategic: Reducing technology costs is just the starting point

Most organizations today are no longer deciding whether they’ll use cloud computing - rather, they're deciding how they'll use it. But will they use software-as-a-service to provide CRM for their sales team instead of managing the application in-house? Should they take advantage of inexpensive, virtualized storage to meet mushrooming data needs? Will a private cloud enable them to better leverage technology investments among different business units? These are now the questions being asked and here, we take a look at the answers.

 

Customizing healthcare: How a new approach to diagnosis, care, and cure could transform employer benefits in a postreform world

Healthcare reform in the US will change funding, insurance coverage, and regulation will affect virtually everyone—including large employers, the majority of which are self-insured. What are proactive companies doing already to consider how reform will change plan eligibility, plan design, underwriting rules, tax deductions, and more and how are they reevaluating their benefits strategies accordingly?

 

Selling the smart grid

For the first time, the utilities industry is preparing to deal with a challenge it has not encountered before: customer relations beyond billings and outages. As cities across the United States gear up to introduce the smart grid, utilities are hoping to find ways of convincing customers that the new technology is beneficial. What must utilities companies do to sell the idea successfully?

 

Framework for SOA services

SOA is now a mainstream strategy for improving IT performance, yet the architecture often does not live up to expectations. The reason? Many implementations are not built on a proven framework for reusable services. To realize maximum gains from SOA, organizations must take extraordinary care to craft a Centralized Services Framework that fuses business knowledge with technical expertise.

 

The cloud you don’t know: An engine for new business growth

Cloud computing can unlock latent value in an organization's key internal capabilities and processes by enabling the extensible enterprise. CEOs who think of cloud computing as strictly a better solution to internal IT will miss a potentially huge opportunity. Is your company on track to embrace the potential opportunities cloud computing offers?

 

Using cloud computing to build an enterprise asset

The impact of cloud computing is changing the role of the IT function to one that supports business development, innovation, and provisioning the user experience. Here, Sanjay Mirchandani of EMC Corporation shares how cloud computing is changing the conversation with the business and its effect on long-term strategy.

 

Ecosystem integration: A cloud challenge and opportunity

In this interview, Mike Capone and Jan Siegmund of ADP discuss the importance of integration among ecosystem partners and how cloud computing contributes to it and the ability to create differentiated customer value.

 

Virtualizing security

How can virtualization of security lead to on-demand provisioning of deep integration among ecosystem participants? Here Jaushin Lee and Andrew Wahl of Imera Systems share their experience how cloud computing challenges traditional approaches to security, and they discuss how security—like servers or storage—can also be virtualized to support cloud-based business models.

 

Cloud opportunity and risks

Gary Hagmueller is the CFO of Zuora, the first subscription billing and payment management system for the cloud and software-as-a-service [SaaS] entities. Here, he talks about the opportunities Zoura is pursuing by moving the billing process to the cloud, and what benefits and risks this presents for the company's customers.

 

Modular services drive value in the cloud

How did making internal capabilities accessible in the cloud reveal new customer value at Amazon? In this interview, Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services (AWS) describes the genesis of Amazon Web Services and the role modular services play in a cloud-oriented business model.

 

Making the extensible enterprise a reality

When it comes to the extensible-enterprise strategy, CEOs will need to consider what cloud computing can do for business growth, and CFOs will need to recognize the ramifications for governance and risk. For their part, The CIO should help identify new cloud-based business opportunities and deliver the network of business platforms to support them.

 

How CFOs should audit the cloud balance sheet

Initially viewed simply as a way to create more agile, efficient IT organizations, cloud computing is fast becoming the means for a new type of growth based on an opportunity that PwC calls the extensible enterprise. How can CFOs use cloud computing to help the enterprise grow, while dealing with the new challenges it presents around governance, risk, and compliance?

 

The value-creating CIO*

CIOs are no longer behind the scenes at their organizations. Now they’re more often expected to create value in client-facing, revenue-oriented areas where employees need the help of technology to explore and capitalize potential new opportunities and demands. Finding these opportunities means getting involved where the business action is: the business itself. So how do CIOs do this successfully?

 

The situational CIO: IT problem solver, cost cutter, strategist

During the recession, CIOs and other executives had to focus on tactical issues like efficiencies and cost cutting, rather than on developing new business strategies. Here, PwC explains how that may change and outlines ways the CIO can become more strategic while handling other responsibilities – an idea we call the “situational CIO”.

 

The future of the CIO: Business strategy and technology innovation

Every Chief Information Officer (CIO) knows that the job has become more complex. The changes of the past 20 years will seem mild compared with those of the next five. CIOs will face unprecedented pressures, and our research shows that many executives expect CIOs to point the way for agile business in today's volatile economy. So how can your CIO help define and execute forward-looking business strategies for your company? Here, we offer some ideas.