Part III. Roadmap and Conclusions

This section finalizes the report with the suggested roadmap of implementation of cloud consulting services in Russia and presents recommendations of the group. The report is summarized and ended with the conclusions.

Roadmap

We understand the roadmap as a practical plan that involves the following parts:

· Description of the existing successful cloud consulting business model as a foundation for suggesting our own model

· Suggestion of the business model and its adjustment to Russian business environment based on the joint results of the literature review and interview analysis;

· Discussion of potential issues and obstacles that might occur in connection with introducing cloud consulting in Russia.

All these parts assumed to be the most important part and the core result of the research done.

Benchmarking

In order to justify the type of company we chose for benchmarking, we firtsly should classify existing types of distributed innovation initiatives take place in the world.

According to the framework above, we can divide distributed innovation crowdsourcing based initiatives into three groups: cooperative, competitive and both collaborative & competititve. The basic separation is in the nature of reason why people are participating in these initiatives: just for cooperation in order to create something new, bring a contribution or to compete and earn money.

As for cooperative initiatives, Malone et al. (2009) gives examples of Wikipedia and Linux. Both suggest collaboration process: in Wikipedia, members of crowd work together in order to create something and important dependencies exist between their contributions. Collaboration exists when members of the crowd start editing and adding information into articles. For example, when one person changed one exact Wikipedia article, and then second person liked changes occurred and decided to add more information on the point, collaboration occurs. Talking about Linux, different contributors are working on one open source software where strong interdependencies between the modules exist.

As for competitive initiatives, Malone et al. (2009) gives examples of Innocentive and Topcoder. First, both crowdsourcing initiatives suggest money for completing the tasks and challenges. In this point they are quiet similar. Nevertheless, there is a significant difference: after years of operating, Innocentive proved that technical and social marginality takes place when completing tasks. Marginality in problem solving means that outsider can solve the problem better than the insider. Moreover, technical and social marginality means that people with “technical or social marginality” are more likely to solve tasks than the insiders of companies. The reason for this effect is connected to the tendency of people “to carry around a surplus of knowledge and enthusiasm for subjects other than those they have chosen as a career path”. For example, a biologist is less likely to win a biology challenge than a chemist or physicist. (Cullen, 2011) While Topcoder – crowdsourcing resource, were programmers compete in order to provide the best solutions for the customers who organize tasks. However, the difference is in more specific specialization (programming) and uncertainty of tasks. While Innocentive focus on variety of specializations and provides its solvers more certain tasks.

The third type is combined collaborative and competitive initiatives, where the reason of participation can be either some profit or contribution. Examples are Threadless, The MathWorks and TopCoder as well (as it has non-paid tasks).

Threadless allows its customers to upload a design of T-shirt, users vote and choose the best one and Threadless starts to produce this designed T-shirts. Here we can see collaborative approach, where voting takes place. As for competitive approach, all persons who upload design can win and get the award, so competitiveness takes place.

In order to choose what type of distributed innovation initiative we should take as a benchmark, we identified the following criteria:

· Our projected company is related to consulting, therefore it will be competitive type of distributed innovation, because consulting suggests earning money for service provision

· Our tasks should be clear from the point of view of clients who want to solve a problem. It means that clients know what is wrong or what they want to achieve , therefore the task is more less clear

· As it was stated, “cloud consulting” approach is not limited only on some industries or areas of specialization, that is why we are not focusing on concrete specialization

Taking these criteria into account we would like to choose Innocentive as the benchmark company, as it matches all the criteria points stated above. In order not to be biased by choosing only one company, we decided to add more “Innocentive-like” companies which we identified during our research. These are NineSigma and YourEncore.

Foundation for business model

In this section of the report we were trying to represent our understanding and vision of cloud consulting in the form of business model. That model was drawn from reviews of businesses of the three companies that currently work either in certain forms of crowdsourcing or open innovations, which are the closest areas to cloud consulting. After our suggestion of the cloud consulting company business model, there is an attempt to see how that model fit into Russian business environment, how can the major potential issues and obstacles be overcomed. For the sake of achieving the most practical representation possible, we decided to focus on the major issues identified by the interview respondents, i.e. managers.

Review of the companies

Innocentive

This section of the report is of great relevance. It provides the detailed description and analysis of the Innocentive’s business model. After thorough research we found that this company is the best successfully operating example of the cloud consulting services firm. In the most important part of the report we provide the roadmap for IBM on implementing cloud consulting in Russia. The business model of Innocentive is a foundation for that roadmap.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 406