Winning ideas must play well with others
Collaboration beats isolation
In this technology-hungr y world, only a few new products turn out to be world-beaters, while most get sold for scrap. But is there a way to figure this out in advance?
Brian Forbes, executive director of Ottawa innovation network Coral CEA contends winning products acquire traction today by being distributed quickly and easily through open platforms. (Think songs on itunes, Android apps sold through Google Play, or everything being sold through Amazon’s nearly universal checkout system.)
The losing products, he says, don’t play well with others. They belong to closed platforms, or no platform at all, requiring users to invest time and resources in mastering each product’s proprietary features.
Today, collaboration is better than isolation; easy sells faster than hard. And Coral CEA — the CEA stands for Communications Enabled Applications — a unique business catalyst and consultancy, wants to get entrepreneurs on the winning track by connecting them to open platforms that create new virtual marketplaces that client firms can not only leverage, but lead.
“If Canadian businesses are going to compete, they need to figure out how to do this,” Forbes says. “Developing open systems plays to our strengths; Canadian businesses are trusted in the m arketplace. We don’t have the brute force to establish our own proprietary system, but we can collaborate with the best of them.”
Turning startups i nto leaders is a tall order, but Coral CEA is a unique public-private joint venture conceived by IBM Canada and Nortel. The main financier is the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation ($9-million over five years), with another $20-million in in-kind support from IBM, Genband (the Texas company that took over most of Nortel’s Internet networking business), Carleton University, the Information Technology Association of Canada, and the Eclipse Foundation, which nurtures the Eclipse opensource platform developed by IBM.
Becoming a member or client of Coral CEA gives a company instant access to a robust, open-source commercialization platform that helps them connect with prospective customers or collaborate with colleagues. “Typical small companies can’t afford to go out and buy these tools,” Forbes says, “so we’re helping them over- come a barrier to entry.”
If a health care company, for instance, develops a new technique for storing patient records, its innovation will reach more new users faster if it is based on a platform that clinics and hospitals already know how to use.
Health care is one of four “ecosystems” on which Coral CEA is focusing, along with aviation, Internet media and the wireless world of “social/local/mobile.” Coral may help companies by offering business or technology advice, contacts and referrals, or grants of up to $30,000 to bridge technology gaps. Member companies also collaborate, sharing experience and knowledge as they build their platforms together. “Coral CEA is truly a community of technology entrepreneurs,” says one member chief executive.
While Coral’s initial work has only involved Ontario companies, Forbes says the network will expand in 2013 to service companies across Canada and in the United States.
The ideal situation for Coral CEA’S Canadian partners, Forbes notes, is to be among the first in these potential clusters, helping set each system’s protocols. Establishing the rules of engagement around your own strengths and specifications can be a crushing competitive advantage.
Since Coral CEA is still new, some ecosystems are coming together faster than others. In some areas, it is still meeting the players and helping them get on their feet. In other sectors, it has big partners and bigger plans.
In aviation, for instance, Coral CEA is working with Nav Canada, the private company that runs Canada’s air-traffic control system, and four international airports (one each in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Middle East) to develop an open community for aviation-related solutions. “If there’s an airport in Singapore that wants to use technology we’ve developed, they can join the ecosystem,” Forbes says. And new recruits can make money by developing their own solutions — for example, a new system for tracking passengers’ baggage.
“They are not really customers in the direct sense,” Forbes says. “They’re more like partners in the ecosystem. They’re contributing back, and that makes the core operations even stronger.”
Led by Nav Canada, Coral’s aviation group is bidding to standardize the incompatible information systems used by airports and airlines around the world.