If innovation was judged on the number of patents a company holds, IBM would be a clear leader in the IT industry.

The company has been at the forefront of technology development for almost as long as computers have existed.

Nick Donofrio, senior vice president of technology and manufacturing, is the IBM executive responsible for the leading the supplier's global innovation strategy.

He talked exclusively to Computing about the challenges for technology innovation in the years ahead.

How would you describe the state of innovation in IT today?

Technology by itself is not the problem, nor is it the answer. That's not what will give us true innovation. What will is a better understanding of the business issues and the points where technology and business come together, and how that can be better understood and developed. It's always been about this, but it was a little less obvious during the 20th century.

Lots of things that were invented or discovered felt like they were the innovation. The transistor is an example. A TV, a radio, or a computer all owe their existence to the transistor, but the transistor itself wasn't the most valuable asset. But as people perfected it, whole new industries emerged, whole new things that could never have been imagined before. That's real business value. We need more things like that, which in IT will be perceived as real innovations.

What factors are driving innovation?

There are going to be lots of transitions people have to go through. Those transitions are always opportunities for people to do better. In my 40 years in the industry, there have been transitions such as going from vacuum tubes to transistors, to integrated circuits, to monolithic circuits and on into nanotechnology.

All these discontinuities give people the opportunity to be more innovative, as they focus more and more on business. Throughout the transformation, technology is there, constantly shaping what you do. It's even more powerful and capable, but it's likely to be less visible and perceived to be less important, because it fades further into the background as real innovation comes to the forefront.

It's now about my business, my problem, my transformation, my issue - what are you going to do to help me?

What are the major barriers hindering innovation at the moment?

There's lots of reasons to worry about whether we can pull this off, one of which is talent. I'm not sure we are preparing and educating people well. What curricula change have we seen to make people more services-ready? How long do we have to wait before we have a degree in services, as far-fetched as that sounds? We now have computer science degrees but up until maybe 25 years ago people scoffed at that idea.

We've come a long way, but it happened very grudgingly. I'm wondering if we're going to get the innovation kick that would make the things happen that I'm hoping for, or if we have to do something more overt.

In the US we're just completing a major piece of work - the National Innovation Initiative. This is a big issue - what are you teaching people, whether the curricula should change, what reformation needs to go through, and whether or not you should think about a primary and secondary education shift as well.

There's a lot of thinking around problem-based learning. Some of the more successful countries never did that well in the standard tests on maths and science. There is a school of thought that thinks it might be unwise if all we do is preach learning by rote. In industry we are problem solvers - that's what we do, we think in a different way, in a multi-disciplined fashion.

I'm not suggesting we send all our scientists to get an MBA, but we want a change in the curricula that does structure multi-disciplined, collaborative, problem-based learning. You have to learn the fundamentals - to add and subtract- but by itself this is not likely to be the winning formula.

Are you talking about yesterday's job or tomorrow's job? I'm more interested in tomorrow's job. If you're holding on to yesterday's job, some lower-value job, you're making a big mistake.

What is the role of government in fostering innovation?

We should be careful not to blame government - it's a shared responsibility. Everybody has some role to play and has to take up the burden. Having said that, government can certainly set the tone, it needs to say - this is a priority.

One point that drives me crazy is that all the metrics around innovation and productivity are on a 20th, and maybe even 19th century, basis - all on a manufacturing culture. There are no meaningful metrics, and then we wonder why we're struggling to figure out what we mean by innovation. In the US, the definition of the services economy includes everything from business transformation consultants to hamburger flippers. Seventy per cent of the economy is services - but we should do a better job of categorising that. How can you change anything unless you are serious about understanding how to measure it?

Consumers are still wary of new technology - what can be done to break down the cultural barriers?

Part of the problem is that IT is too hard. A lot of technologies going forward will fix that - they will make the front-ends of a lot of systems much more natural, more intuitive. You may not have keyboards and screens, you'll have voice, vision, writing. We call this the pervasive world. Sometimes it doesn't need any cue from you, it just needs to know you are there and it does things for you, just like a doorman at a hotel.

Technology is finally going to be wonderful at the front end. You'll be able to talk to the web, you won't have to pound a keyboard. That will break a lot of the cultural barriers, people won't have to say - I'm not computer literate. The IT industry is ripe for that, and all the technology breakthroughs I see coming will follow that. We can erase that cultural issue if we put our minds to it.

But I worry about the multi-disciplined culture. Can we make the cultural shifts that say it's not my silo, or not my product, it's our collective thought that is the innovative idea. It's the things you do, connected to what I do, connected to what he does. Those are the cultural barriers that may hurt us the most as we think about how innovation will move faster. The old idea of discovering something by yourself is probably gone, or at least won't have as much value as working in a collaborative fashion.

And what are the technological challenges?

It's not the technology, it's not how bright we are or whether we can see it or find it. We can do all that. It's whether we can break through with these cultural shifts.

I worry least about physical technologies. There will be new creations and discoveries and inventions. The real issue is what we do with it.

What do you think? Email feedback@computing.co.uk

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