Innovate to Survive
// January 27th, 2011 // Uncategorized
This BBC technology report by Kabir Chibber focuses on the importance of innovation in businesses of any size. Microsoft’s director of the Future Social Experiences Labs Ralf Herbrich has recently launched a piece of software that allows users to filter news to their taste on the web, or on their mobile phones. In many fields, like social networking, some would say Microsoft has been left for dead. However, it is at places like these that it fights back.
The Microsoft Research facility in Cambridge is one of six that the US corporation has around the world, including ones in Cairo and Bangalore, where some of the world’s smartest people are paid to sit around and come up ideas.
“Our role is to do basic research, which is to discover new things and create new technologies that can be turned into the Microsoft products that people buy and use,” says Andrew Herbert, chairman of Microsoft Research in Europe.
Discovering new things is at the heart of innovation, and that becomes harder and harder to do as companies become bigger. Bureaucracy starts to kick in as layers of management are formed and companies expand abroad. Ironically, the behemoth that is Microsoft finds itself as a start-up in some areas outside the PC, fighting competitors like Apple and Google in phones, search and tablets.
