IBM: "Collaboratories" and more

The buildings that house IBM's Thomas J. Watson and Almaden Research Centers are emblematic of an earlier time and an earlier attitude toward research. "The places are built high on a hill far away from everything else," Chesbrough observes. "They are almost physically designed to keep ideas from leaking out. If you look at the newer ones -- like Microsoft, Google or even Intel -- they are constructed to get ideas to flow in rather than to keep them out."

Buildings notwithstanding, research is a new ball game at IBM, Chesbrough says. "IBM is an old dog that has learned some wonderful new tricks and is having great success doing it."

While IBM remains strong in basic research in materials, semiconductors and the like, it has turned its R&D efforts more and more toward services and support technologies, he says. And a decision to support non-IBM products in its Global Services unit has "pushed IBM Research into the open standards domain -- Linux, Java, blade servers and other things," he says.

Shortly after John Kelly's ascendency to the top of IBM Research last year, he announced that IBM would spend more than US$100 million over three years on each of four "high-risk" basic research areas:

• Nanotechnology
• Cloud computing and Internet-scale data centers
• Integrated systems and chip architecture
• Managing business integrity through advanced math and computer science

He said IBM would increase collaboration with universities, government agencies and other companies, citing the success of earlier alliances with universities in nanotechnology and semiconductors. He also mentioned speech technology as an area in which IBM would collaborate more.

Part of IBM's new game plan is the establishment of "collaboratories," mostly small, regional joint ventures with universities, foreign governments or commercial partners designed to tap into local skills, funding and sales channels in order to get new technology quickly into the marketplace. For example, in February, IBM announced it would form a nanotechnology collaboratory with Saudi Arabia to develop and market water desalination, solar energy and petrochemical applications.

Mark Dean, an IBM Fellow and a vice president at IBM Research, hails the payoff from distributed collaborative research, but he says it has its challenges. "When you have people everywhere, you need technology to make people feel they are together, like there is some camaraderie," he says. "You need a sense of family on a project. This is an area that has to be worked on."