The role of technology in innovation

Technology in Innovation

The Role of Technology in Innovation

Enabling innovation through the use of technology continues to be a major priority for many enterprises globally as the pace of new product development continues to accelerate and industries become more turbulent. Of the many priorities that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have in supporting their organizations, defining and implementing strategies to bring innovation into their firms is consistently ranked as one of the highest (Kleis, Chwelos, Ramirez, Cockburn, 2012). With so much attention on making innovation a core part of the Information Technologies (IT) platform of a company, there are many technology vendors orienting their products and services to this priority that CIOs have.

Analysis of Technologies That Enable Innovation

Among the many technologies available for facilitating innovation throughout an enterprise, two most promising are the use of cloud computing and mobile technologies. Cloud computing is a pervasive set of technologies that can enable collaboration platforms to be securely, reliably deployed over the Internet

(Arinze, Anandarajan, 2010). Cloud computing's stack of technologies including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) also are replacing many of the legacy mainframe systems that companies had been reliant on for decades, getting successively less value from them over time (Kleis, Chwelos, Ramirez, Cockburn, 2012). Cloud computing has also served as a strong catalyst for the growth of disruptive innovations in the area of enterprise software, delivering entirely new functionality, ease of use, and cost reductions for customers in the process (Arinze, Anandarajan, 2010). SaaS is such a powerful disruptive force in enterprise software it will eventually lead to the re-ordering of enterprise software economics. It is also a very strong catalyst for internal innovation and re-defining of business processes within an organization. As an application platform it is permeable enough to give CIOs the flexibility they need in defining new applications needed within their companies to enable more fluid communication and collaboration (Nambisan, Bacon, Throckmorton, 2012). The cloud computing platform has also made it possible for companies to integrate their information technologies and services into a common strategy; a goal that had not been attainable in the past (Buttol, Buonamici, Naldesi, Rinaldi, Zamagni, Masoni, 2012).