Partnership between Cambridge Technology Partners and Spigit

Idea and innovation management increasingly important for sustainable business success

Nyon/Zurich – July 18, 2011 – Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), leading Swiss IT consulting company, is pleased to announce a partnership with Spigit, leading provider of collective idea and innovation management software. CTP is already involved in several projects that aim to promote innovation. With this partnership, CTP is further strengthening its consultancy and implementation expertise in this fast-growing market segment.

Solutions for idea and innovation management bring genuine added value to companies, and demand is correspondingly growing; for example, market researchers at Gartner estimate that over the next two to five years, applications for idea and innovation management will reach the mass market. CTP supports customers with its experience in resolving organizational challenges of innovation management, and in identifying effective innovation processes to put them – combined with its functional know-how and project management expertise – into place.

The partnership with Spigit allows CTP to optimally address customers’ needs for comprehensive solutions in the field of idea and innovation management. Spigit’s applications enable organisations to collect and to develop the ideas of employees, business partners and customers in an effective, efficient and organised manner, and to transform the most promising ones into concrete implementation projects. This means companies are able to activate their whole collective intelligence and to use their entire innovation potential, to reinforce or expand their market position.

“Innovations are crucially important to long-term success”, says Vijay Srinivasan, CEO of Cambridge Technology Partners. “Companies of all sizes have to continuously reinvent themselves in order to defend their market position or to gain additional market shares. Our long-standing consulting experience in combination with the leading solution for idea and innovation management from Spigit helps customers to execute corresponding initiatives and to implement the associated necessary processes. By this means, innovation is made a constant companion, and not a once-off event.”

Project Management 2.0

Project Management 2.0 (or PM 2.0) is a new term that is becoming more and more popular, but the exact definition is still unclear to many people. In short, PM 2.0 is a term used to describe an evolution of project management practices using the support of Web 2.0 technologies aiming to increase team productivity, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Let’s look as an example at a typical day of a project manager. The daily tasks consist of checking emails for projects updates, call or email team members to make sure everything is on track and elaborate reports to the senior management. With less administrative work, project managers would be able to concentrate more on the leadership part of the management job. With a PM 2.0 concept the top-down conceptions of managing projects are giving way to a new model, one where the manager’s role has less controller or overseer responsibilities and more emphasis is placed on the ability to plan, adapt and communicate – as a leader.

The following table is a comparison between traditional Project management and PM2.0:

Traditional Project Management	Project Management 2.0
Centralization of control	Decentralization of control
Top-down planning	Bottom-up planning
Authoritarian environment	Collaborative environment
Implied structure	Emergent structures
Limited/Restricted Access to the plan	Organized/Unlimited Access to the plan
Local Access to information	Global/Live Access to information
Limited Communications within team	Unlimited Communications within team
Separate projects	Holistic approach
Overly complex tools	Easy to use tools
Rigidity of tools	Flexibility of tools

PM 2.0 relies on the same concept as Enterprise 2.0. So, while the collective intelligence helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-to-date picture of operations, the Web 2.0 tools will boost the efficiency of teams and at the same time reduce the daily routine, leaving room for creativity and leadership.

Switzerland is #1 in term of innovation. Thanks to your company?

INSEAD, the famous French business school, has just published its renowned yearly Global Innovation Index (GII). Switzerland takes the top slot of the 2011 edition. This country moved up three places since 2010.

This annual study investigates the “input pillars” (factors enabling innovation) and the “output pillars” (actual achievements in innovation) and drills down many layers to get a composite innovation rating for 125 countries.

Booz & Company, one of the report contributors says, “The ability to innovate is the great equalizer in the global economy. In the industrial era, nations relied on their natural resources to compete. Today, any country can advance with carefully focused investments in talent and R&D. The performance of some emerging economies in this year’s GII shows what nations can accomplish with a focus on building 21st century economies.”

This top ranking shows that the Swiss enterprises benefit from a very healthy milieu to engage on the innovation path: stable political environment, good business and market sophistication, performing research institutes, and large scientific outputs.

Does your company leverage these encouraging conditions to their full extend ? Does your management capitalize on this positive environment? Is your organizational culture “yes we can” oriented?

If you are just focusing on the problems related to the cost of labor and the weight of the Swiss currency, you might want to consider widening up the scope of efforts and dedicate some time on the opportunities by using the ideal innovation oriented environment at your disposal.

Global Innovation Index 2011: http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii/main/fullreport/index.html