Is collaboration with business partners a key part of business- model innovation?
Our point of view is simple: In today’s environment, with all the global opportunities that exist and these new technologies, the best way to make them unique for your own enterprise is to foster collaboration. You can do that in multiple dimensions. You can collaborate within your own organization. We can be multicultural and diverse in IBM because we happen to be in 173 countries around the world. So, by definition, there’s a lot we can do amongst ourselves to collaborate with different views of opportunity or technology within our diverse population. In addition, you need to collaborate between companies and governments and educational institutions. I think that the breakthrough that we got done in the Cell processor, which is based on our Power architecture, would not have happened if we hadn’t designed chips for Sony (SNE ), Toshiba (TOSBF ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and Nintendo (NTDOY ). Now, clearly, some of these folks are easy to collaborate with because they aren’t in our space —
