Future Demands: Establishing Strategic Foresight and Innovation Research Group & Practices IBM Systems
Client:
IBM
Project Date:
2020-2021
Objectives:
Establish a dedicated research group within IBM Systems aimed at integrating market-based strategic foresight for product management and design to predict, plan, and cater to upcoming market needs.
Situation & Tasks:
IBM System’s core product, the IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframes, require a 2 to 3 year development cycle. As a highly optimized hardware with extensive research & development timelines, all IBM Systems customer use cases, software performance, and workloads are highly dependent on predictive research used design hardware components years in advance. With millions of dollars spent on R&D in an increasingly uncertain tech landscape, IBM systems needed a forward-looking and dynamic approach to its products to address rapidly changing market scenarios in AI, security, and infrastructure.
Actions:
Created the IBM Future Demands team, hosted strategic foresight workshops, speculative research trainings, and designed future-proofing methodologies to enable IBM Systems to enter its multi-year development cycle with confidence.
Assembled a cross-functional team of six specialized researchers, product managers, and designers.
Crafted 30+ lightweight futures-research frameworks from established strategic foresight practices.
Orchestrated six product-futures workshops with participation from over 80 cross-functional IBM Systems product managers, designers, engineers, marketers, and sales executives. These workshops employed various futures thinking methodologies, scenario planning, and horizon scanning.
Utilized the insights gathered from workshops to craft multiple futures artifacts tailored to specific market scenarios enabling teams to communicate market risks, opportunities, objectives, and strategies with executive leadership and high-priority partners.
Developed three distinct product foresight playbooks consisting of 10+ product roadmaps attuned to potential future market conditions and user demands.
Spearheaded the creation of a novel business unit framework for assessing product and team agility, ensuring that IBM Z's planning and development cycles remained adaptive and resilient to future shifts.
Results:
Future Demands workshops equipped IBM Systems with strategic foresight, streamlining planning with a future-centric approach and crafted 10+ strategic product roadmaps for AI, security, and blockchain teas, thus aligning products to anticipated market shifts.
In 2020, Future Demands workshops empowered IBM to spot early market signals and user trends. This foresight and continuous tracking led to the development and launch of marketing-leading AI infrastructure, positioning IBM to lead the generative AI infrastructure surge, beginning development three years before generative AI’s introduction to the public.
