Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Posted by
John Dearborn
Most of us know Steve Jobs for developing life-changing technologies we use every day. We carry our children’s photographs on our iPhones. We cue up the soundtracks for our lives on the iPod. We key in secret passwords to open accounts on our iPads. These products are intensely personal to us.
Perhaps that’s why the late CEO and his products are part of our vocabulary and yet few of us would hold even the most successful and inspiring B2B technology innovators up in the same light, even though they have been responsible for enormous hiring activities and wealth generators, well beyond their own. Take Larry Ellison, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corp., one of the world's leading enterprise software companies. He seems to fit the iconic innovator bill. But one could argue he doesn’t have the same cult-like following as does Jobs.
Then there’s Thomas J. Watson. Watson was the business leader who made IBM and its punched card tabulating machines an international force in the first half of the 20th century. He established Big Blue’s management style and corporate culture, turning a back-room technology company into a selling machine.
Today, IBM is the second largest publicly-traded technology company in the world, by market capitalization. The company makes power, server and storage systems, in addition to software. In 2010, it had revenues of $100 billion and employed 426,751 people worldwide. To put that in perspective, Apple had $108 billion in net sales in the year ended Sept. 24, employing 60,400.
IBM also holds the record for technology company patents in the United States. Its famous inventions include the automated teller machine, hard disk drive, Universal Product Code and artificial intelligence, aptly named Watson.
And what of Andy Grove? Grove pioneered the semiconductor industry, co-founding Intel Corp. in 1968 to make dynamic memory chips, which we know as DRAMs. Three years later, Intel made the world’s first microprocessor. Today, Intel’s processing, memory and Ethernet products power most personal computers, servers and smart phones. The company had net revenue of almost $44 billion last year, employing 82,500 people worldwide – a pretty big impact.
Watson and Grove are but two of the B2B technology giants who have changed our lives, even though most of us don’t know their names. Many giants stand alongside: like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard at H-P, John Chambers at Cisco Systems, Bill Gates at Microsoft, Meg Whitman at eBay and now Hewlett-Packard. And that’s just a handful.
To get some thoughts on this, I asked some of the experts in software development in Northeast Ohio. “Although innovators like Grove are giants in the B2B industry, we are unlikely to see Saturday Night Live skits about them,” laughs Bob Sopko, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI), partners in the JumpStart Entrepreneurial Network.
“It’s hard to be iconic in the B2B technology area,” says Sopko, who also manages strategic technology partnerships at Case Western Reserve University. “The iconic folks in history are few and far between,” he explains, pointing to Richard Branson of Virgin Group as close to Jobs-like celebrity in the B2B industry. “Sure, it’s great to have an out-of-the-box genius who invents something you didn’t know you needed,” says George Buzzy, another YBI entrepreneur-in-residence who is also managing partner at AG Partners, a private equity and strategic advisory firm in Hudson. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily needed on the B2B side.”
It seems that the “Jobsian method” of product development may be better suited to consumer product development rather than development of most B2B information technologies, according to author Dan Adams.
“Generally speaking, for those of us who aren’t Steve Jobs, the practice of developing new products first and then waiting to see if customers buy them is a terribly inefficient use of resources,” Adams wrote in “New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth” (AIM Press, 2008). I believe, and Adams seems to agree, that some of the best business and industrial products are developed to solve market needs – not the other way around.
This is also the way we encourage our client IT companies to develop and deploy their products: identify the needs and then answer them in distinctive, game-changing ways.
The B2B technology industry has come a long way led by lesser-known or at least less-worshiped visionaries. Recognition would be nice, but we’ve got something just as good— life-changing technologies that significantly push the economic needle in a positive direction.
John Dearborn is President of JumpStart and brings experience as an entrepreneur, founder and CEO at companies across the US and Europe over the last 25 years to the pursuit of economic transformation in Northeast Ohio.