The rented Palo Alto, Calif., garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard pursued their dream has become legendary. With $538 in working capital and an unwavering desire to develop innovative, useful products, the two college friends began part-time work in a humble 12-by-18-foot garage, where they blazed a pioneering trail in electronics.

Known today as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the HP Garage stands as the enduring symbol of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit.

Seven decades later, innovation remains at the core of business success.

“If you don’t differentiate, you are dead,” says Mikko Uusitalo, director worldwide Alliances Sales for HP Communications and Media Solutions (CMS) business unit. “Innovation is key to coming up with new ways to generate growth!”

Uusitalo recently led a five week innovative “Blue Ocean - Out of the Garage” initiative, using the HP Garage, a Web-based innovation software tool, to collect 236 ideas from the CMS organization. “It’s amazing what you get when you open the firehose, provide the tools for the community to contribute and let people dream,” continues Uusitalo.

Innovation provides businesses with the key elements to grow. Not just for enterprising entrepreneurs, innovation can revitalize a mature business and take it to the next level. It also helps motivate and mobilize teams and organizations.

While innovation is a global business imperative today, its primary role has shifted. The business value proposition is no longer just about designing innovative technologies. Rather, it is about creating “value innovations” or “blue oceans” of uncontested market space that is ripe for growth. With blue oceans, demand is created rather than contested, as described in the international bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.¹

Driving innovation during changing times presents several challenges like:

• How to balance the investment in current operations versus innovation requirements
• Understanding business processes, market products and business models and re-inventing them as the new opportunities arise
• Balancing between addressing current customer requirements versus investing into new and disruptive ideas
• Motivating employee talent

“One of the key challenges for business innovation is creating a large pool of ideas. It is hard to innovate by yourself. You need to get people on board to brainstorm more ideas – and develop them further in a collaborative environment,” says Erwan Menard, vice president and general manager for HP CMS. “HP regularly examines its organizational structure to ensure room for innovation. We also invest in developing tools and processes for innovation incubation. One of the latest is the HP Garage collaboration tool that we used very successfully in our recent Blue Ocean innovation project.”

Menard adds, “The more people are called to innovate, the better chance there is to come up with the non-obvious, enabling a differentiated value proposition, and therefore making the HP offering more compelling in the market place. That’s the power of collaboration!”

Innovation often involves these elements:

• Scope
• Collaboration
• Management buy-in and corporate sponsorship
• Investment in resources
• Use of appropriate tools
• Execution

Businesses that innovate tend to do so across the value chain, manage business processes and know how to determine the right combination of technologies to get to market faster.

A value proposition based on technical excellence or a product-centric approach no longer suffices. Customers must perceive that innovation delivers true business value to them.

Significantly, a successful innovation cycle must engender greater emphasis on employee collaboration and customer feedback at all stages. To this end, businesses should:

• Examine the organization’s internal dynamics
• Provide employees “space” to innovate
• Actively encourage employees to innovate
• Leverage the power of global collaborative communication
• Value all employee ideas
• Listen actively to customers

“The challenge is to balance the time between R&D and spending time with customers,” says Menard. “There is no single path to innovation. Within HP and especially the communications and media industry, it is amazing how much need and interest there is to collaborate among different silos.”

The telecom industry is powered by innovation. Giving consumers the products and services they want, when they want. HP Communications and Media Solutions, a communications software and solutions business for HP, enables telecom companies to provide innovative, customized solutions to their customers while increasing revenue. Beyond traditional voice and data services, HP enables service providers to deliver subscribers personalized, content-rich services such as video messaging, instant conferencing and interactive gaming. Innovation is about differentiating. HP Communication and Media Solutions portfolio can help differentiate your business with innovative solutions that offer your subscribers an instant connection to any person, group or information.

	Your feedback is important to us. Was this article useful/informative?
	Not at all(1)		Neutral(3)		Definitely(5)