IBM 2001 Annual Report Download - page 29

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no. 9
We brought the marketplace
into our labs
BRINGING CUSTOMER FOCUS TO OUR TECHNICAL COMMUNITY
“IBM products aren’t launched. They escape.”
During the early 1990s, we heard that frequently, both
from customers and from our own scientists, engineers
and developers.
So we set to work reinventing the way we create, develop and
deploy new technologies. We got innovations to market much
faster, but we also found we had to do the reverse
—
bring real-
world customer wants and needs into our laboratories.
Today, the linkage between our research and development
labs and the marketplace has never been tighter. At the same
time our researchers are chasing computational grand
challenges or pioneering the frontiers of material science,
we’re just as apt to be building prototype solutions with a
customer. In fact, one quarter of our researchers are involved
in this kind of joint project. Ideas flow in. Technologies flow
out. The result is a new type of creative chemical reaction
—
between the discoveries of the lab and the immediate needs of
business
—
that opens up new possibilities in both.