In 1980, IBM was at an impasse. Having already missed the market for minicomputers, it was now seeing a new cadre of competitors emerge. Fledgling companies like Apple and Commodore were selling stripped down computers for personal use and the market was growing quickly. It looked like IBM would miss out again. So the company’s leadership authorized Don Estridge and ...

Every organization strives to innovate, but few succeed consistently over time. That’s why so many once dominant companies hit a peak and then decline. A recent study estimates that 50% of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years. Success is supposed to breed success, but it often breeds failure. Yet IBM, Google and Amazon have ...

IBM, to a large degree, invented the information technology industry. For the first half of the 20th century, it dominated the market for tabulating machines. Then digital computing posed new challenges and, by the 1950s it had begun to cede ground to UNIVAC, which led to Thomas Watson Jr’s $5 billion gamble to build the System 360. That effort was transformative, but ...

In 1958, a brilliant young mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot went to work as a researcher for IBM. His first assignment seemed like a straightforward problem, but turned out to be devilishly complex. He was tasked with figuring out how noise in communication lines arises and identifying some way of minimizing it. His solution was simple but ingenious. He realized that ...

Work used to be pretty simple. You got up in the morning, did your job and came home at the end of the day. Most people spent their whole career doing pretty much the same thing for the same employer. They were judged by their skill, diligence and seniority and, at the end of it all, they looked forward to ...

Probably the hardest thing in business is to innovate consistently, year after year and decade after decade. Take a look at any industry at any point in time and you’ll find one company that seems to have hit on a secret formula only to find that ten years later that things have gone awry. Consider the technology industry. If you looked ...

I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow Innovation author Greg Satell to talk with him about his new book Mapping Innovation, which is his first book. Congratulations Greg!

Quantum Superposition and Quantum Entanglement are hard ideas to accept because they run counter to what we experience in normal life. Yet it is exactly these ideas that IBM is betting on now. To help me wrap my head around it all, I spent several hours talking to Charlie Bennett, an IBM Fellow considered to be one of the founders of quantum information theory.

Competition between Google and IBM is an unusual business rivalry because the two rarely compete in the same markets or for the same customers. In truth, it is a rivalry for technical rather than market dominance. Yet much like Apple vs. Microsoft, it's likely to determine much about how technology shapes our world.

Google, many other cutting edge companies are sharing key technologies openly. Soon after Google released TensorFlow, Facebook announced it would open source its own library of AI tools. Tesla open-sourced its electric car patents. Even more recently, IBM shared its quantum computing platform on the cloud.