Driving Innovation into The Marketplace: IBM'S First-of-a-Kind Program

Advancing from a lab prototype to a commercial product or service offering can be a lengthy and risky process. IBM's First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) program is an attempt to take a short cut by bringing IBM researchers and clients together in the marketplace to test new technologies on real business problems and growth opportunities. The goal is to accelerate the delivery of innovative technologies into the marketplace from IBM's eight world-wide research labs and to generate new growth opportunities for the company and its clients. Program Overview Founded in 1995, FOAK is a direct collaboration between IBM's research and sales divisions that allows the sales team to leapfrog the company's traditional development cycle and help guide research efforts toward strategic markets. In the FOAK model, sales identifies strategic market segments and targets early-adopter clients--those with a record of being first in introducing innovations to their industries and business partners--those contractually committed to work with IBM to deliver key elements of solutions to clients--to work side-by-side with IBM scientists, testing new ideas and innovative technologies. Because the FOAK program funds only 20-25 projects each year, project selection is critical. FOAK selects research that is too immature to be included in a product plan (one to two years), but not so immature that it poses a substantial risk to the client's business. IBM funds researchers as they pilot their innovations in a real business environment, and the FOAK client invests in the hardware, software and services needed to fully participate in the project. The success of a FOAK project takes different forms: knowledge gained from early in-market experiences with new technologies; development of a working prototype of a solution not yet available in the marketplace; the know-how to improve a client's business; or software components, methodologies and tools for reuse in IBM products and services. The program aims to prove market success with the first client so that the innovations can be made available on a larger scale through commercialized offerings from IBM's brands and strategic business partners. The challenge here goes beyond just solving one client's problem. A commercialized offering needs to be well-defined so it can be sold, standardized so that it can be delivered repeatedly to different clients, and supported with staff and tools that give it reliability. Examples of FOAK projects include: * Driving costs down and increasing asset utilization in financial services firms by creating a scheduler to balance workloads and allocate resources on demand. * Improving product quality and reducing manufacturing and warranty costs for a car maker by developing a framework that combines requirements for engineering, conceptual design and analytical models. * Improving a community's security while containing costs by using analytic tools to index digital video recordings and issue real-time alerts when suspicious patterns are detected. IBM promotes the FOAK program as an example of innovation and collaboration. This leads to conversations with clients and partners that center around three areas of interest: First, where do the ideas come from and how does IBM determine which ones to invest in? Second, how does IBM select its FOAK partners? And third, what happens to the assets upon completion of a project? Identifying and Selecting Ideas Many people generate new FOAK ideas: researchers, product developers, industry marketers, sales teams, IBM executives and clients. However, the majority of ideas come from the industry sales teams and the researchers themselves. IBM Research has key people with specific marketplace knowledge and experience, industry research relationship managers (RRM). These RRMs are seasoned researchers who, in addition to performing research in their fields of expertise, take on the responsibility of working with a particular industry. …