(Photo credit: nyoin)

The debate over R&D spending is very real today and in fact heating up as more and more companies need to innovate. As Research budget has been cut (due to cost control), it is a critical question of where R is going to happen. The article, “Trickle-Down Web Innovation Breathes New Life Into Enterprise IT,” discusses an interesting perspective that in open source communities, research (R) can happen in the open source community, but I don’t quite agree.

While open source offers a strong community of free thinkers contributing to a product, platform , database or app, that community can not take on the research or innovation requirements of a company. Yes, I love the fact that Cloudera is based on open source, *BUT*, how I use Cloudera, how I innovate and if I innovate can happen by the direct involvement of the company and not the community of contributors.

Up until 10 years ago, we had vibrant organizations, who brought together brilliant thinkers to solve difficult problems. A nexus of innovation. Examples of this include but are not limited to Xerox Parc, BBN, Bell Labs, and others. Some of the most fundamental and game changing innovation rose from such organizations. Effectively “Research Arms for Hire”, solving extremely complex problems, setting the pace for today’s innovation. Furthermore, it created vibrant, thriving and highly prestigious places for graduates of sciences, engineering and many other disciplines to go to. My 12 years at BBN will perhaps be my best 12 years, as you could not help but learn new things every day, be challenged and grow.

With the disappearances of such think tanks and shrinking or ill-defined large corporate research budgets, the question is a serious one: How will we innovate? I am not talking about new apps or yet another mobile ‘thing’. Rather, fundamental and game-changing, make-the-impossible-possible innovation?

I believe that the solution is quite simple: we need to recreate the think tank environment in a much more agile and flexible manner. Global and virtual. Inviting contributors and participants to join in, to offer defining innovation to large and varied verticals. The model will operate as Innovation-as-a-Service (In-a-a-S), with the focus of thinking of solutions, enabling innovation in an extremely agile manner. More on this soon, but this is not a new idea for me. Also, in my current work with very large enterprises I have come to learn that ‘innovation’ is not cherished and recognized as it should be, at times viewed as a de-focus. Imagine what we could do if we brought huge global talent together to solve really wicked hard problems? Except instead of a brick and mortar building as it was at BBN, this will now be the world’s largest and growing virtual innovation as a service entity. I hope you are as elated as I am about the possibility.

Rather one which I have been cultivating since BBN closed its doors over a decade ago, and I found myself asking the following unanswered question:

So, how do we innovate TODAY?

Stay tuned and I hope you are as excited about this possibility as I am. More thoughts coming to you soon.