Inovacao rio info_microsoft_publico
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Como a Microsoft inova? De modo estruturado ou nao-estruturado? Neste deck compartilho alguns exemplos e casos reais de produtos e solucoes que nasceram desses 2 modelos
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Inovacao rio info_microsoft_publico
- 3. • 61 (of 100) companies from the 1917 list ceased to exist by 1987 • 2 outperformed the market • Only 74 (of 500) companies from 1957 remained on the list in 1997 • 12 outperformed the market Forbes 100 S&P 500 Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market, 2001 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 1958 1983 2008 Years BusinessWeek, 2010 Imperativo para Inovação
- 4. O que é Inovação?
- 5. Por que acelerar uma cultura de inovação?
- 6. EXECUTION CULTURE EXPLORATION CULTURE Reward Results Reward Initiative/risk Follow the plan Follow the value Coordinate activities Separate investigations Deliberate pace Rapid pace Avoid failure Learn from failure Predictable technology/customers Unpredictable technology/customers Team Founder mentality Executar & Explorar 6
- 8. © 2011 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 8
- 9. © 2011 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 9
- 12. Estudantes
- 13. @dbordini
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- Presenter Guidance:This presentation provides a sample script; however, we strongly recommend that you learn the script content as a way to tell the story and then rely on the key points to guide your discussion. Slide timing is approximate and should be considered a guide only. © 2011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.Microsoft, Bing, BizSpark, Excel, Kinect, Microsoft Dynamics, MS-DOS, Outlook, SharePoint, SQL Server, Surface, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Azure, and Xbox are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.Microsoft Corporation • One Microsoft Way • Redmond, WA 98052-6399 • USA
- Key Points:Based in South Korea, this machine uses Kinect to reward dancers with Coke.http://www.inquisitr.com/402829/intelligent-coca-cola-vending-machine-rewards-great-dance-moves-with-free-cokes/“The Coca Cola Company recently unveiled the latest vending machine technology in South Korea and the experiment met with great success. The new high tech machine encouraged passing shoppers to demonstrate their break dance moves and rewarded the best efforts with free Cokes.As shoppers stroll through the mall, they are quickly challenged by the machine to emulate the dance moves of South Korea’s ultra popular boy band, 2 PM. When a brave soul accepts the invitation, they are instructed to step on the bright red circle painted on the floor, and the magical machine begins the fun. . . Some of the less technology friendly members of the audience might think there was a person hidden inside the double sized vending machine, but in reality, the crowd friendly soda dispenser makes use of Microsoft’s Kinect technology. Sensors read the dancers body moves and when they copy the dance step correctly, out pops a bottle of Coke. The lucky winner can take their free drink or bust a few more moves to win free Cokes for their friends.Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/402829/intelligent-coca-cola-vending-machine-rewards-great-dance-moves-with-free-cokes/#3X1S3rvUZLx2e3D6.99
- Timing: 4 minutes Key Points:In the face of a challenging economy, growing global competition, and shifting consumer expectations, innovation is more important than ever to the survival of every organization.A company’s strong performance today is no guarantee of longevity: companies that survive and prosper in the long term continually adapt, evolve, and reinvent themselves to stay relevant in the changing marketplace. Script:Companies are returning to a focus on innovation and growth—as they must to survive. During the height of the recession, cost cutting was a primary focus for nearly every organization we spoke with, and innovation efforts often paid the price. However, this is no longer the case:A 2010 Boston Consulting Group survey of senior executives found that 72 percent of respondents considered innovation a top three priority, up from 64 percent in 2009, and “84 percent of respondents said their company considers innovation an important or extremely important lever in its ability to reap the benefits of an economic recovery.” A year later, this focus on growth and innovation continues, even intensifies. In Gartner’s CIO survey for this year, “increasing enterprise growth” was the number one business strategy for 2011, and “attracting and retaining new customers” was the second (up from fifth place the year before). While “reducing enterprise costs” is in third position, “creating new products and services (innovation)” comes in at fourth place, after sitting in sixth and eighth positions the previous two years. Factors such as the economy aren’t the only drivers for increasing innovation. Organizations face increasing competition globally. In fact, in BusinessWeek’s 2010 list of the most innovative companies around the world, for the first time since the start of the list the majority of the companies in the top 25 were from outside the United States, with representatives from Asia, Europe, and South America. Furthermore, consumer expectations are rapidly changing as a result of factors including shifting demographics and the increasing role that technology (from mobile devices to online games to social networks) plays in their lives. For all of these reasons, innovation has become a critical capability for businesses. As Gartner puts it: “Innovation is no longer the province of a few leading-edge companies; it is the lifeblood required for any organization to survive.” While innovation may be critical in the short term, it has always been essential to the long-term success of organizations. According to the book Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market, the most successful, high-performing companies continually reinvent themselves. Consider two lists of the world’s largest organizations: In the Forbes 100, over the 70 years from 1917 to 1987, 61 of the original 100 companies not only dropped off the list but ceased to exist altogether. Furthermore, of the surviving 39 companies, only 18 remained on the list. And of those 18, only two consistently outperformed the market. The Standard & Poor’s 500 list (S&P 500) shows a similar trend, over a shorter time period. Forty years after the list was published in 1957, only 74 of the original 500 were still on it in 1997. And of those 74, only 12 outperformed the market. What does this mean? Success today in no way guarantees success tomorrow, and often an organization’s decline is the result of sticking to a once-successful business model despite changing times. And those changing times are accelerating. If you look at the chart on the slide, you can see that the average length of time that businesses spend on the S&P 500 is dropping rapidly: from 57 years in 1958, to 30 years in 1983, to just 18 years in 2008. What will it be in, say, 2020? As BusinessWeek observes, “the rate and scale of disruption brought about by innovation” has “massively accelerated” thanks to the “digital revolution.” It is increasingly clear that rapid and rampant innovation is fundamental to business success. Additional Information:“Innovation 2010: A Return to Prominence—and the Emergence of a New World Order.” Boston Consulting Group. April 2010. http://www.bcg.com/documents/file42620.pdfMcDonald, Mark P, and Dave Aron. “Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda.” Gartner, Inc. January 2011. http://www.gartner.com/resources/210300/210382/executive_summary_reimaginin_210382.pdfArndt, Michael, and Bruce Einhorn. “The 50 Most Innovative Companies.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek. April 15, 2010. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_17/b4175034779697.htmFenn, Jackie. “Key Issues for Business Innovation and Emerging Trends, 2011.” Gartner, Inc. March 30, 2011. http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=1611341Foster, Dick, and Sarah Kaplan. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Reviewed by John L. Hob, Jr. http://bookideas.com/reviews/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayReview&id=980Johnson, Mark W. “The Role of the Chief Innovation Officer.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek. November 3, 2010. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/nov2010/ca2010113_754979.htm
- Timing: 7 minutes Presenter Guidance:Customize this slide to fit your customer. Remove any examples that are not relevant to your customer or that reflect your customer’s direct competition. Add other examples that could prompt an engaging, relevant discussion. (Visit http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011 for examples of other innovative companies that may be appropriate to highlight.) Key Points:At Microsoft, we believe that successful innovation is more than just invention. True innovation must also support organizational performance, either by directly contributing to revenue growth or by delivering new efficiencies that help improve a business’s competitiveness.We also believe that innovation is more than just creating all-new products, services, processes, and business models. Some of the greatest innovations represent “the adjacent possible”—wherein existing ideas are applied in new contexts to create new opportunities. Script:Success is more than just invention. It’s helpful to establish just exactly what it is we mean by innovation. For some, innovation is invention: creating something new. However, at Microsoft, we believe it is more than that. We believe that innovation is about converting knowledge and ideas into new or improved products, processes, and services to gain a competitive advantage. That last part is important: invention can be exciting, but it should directly contribute to the business’s success to be considered an innovation. Consider some of these examples of recent innovations: <Presenter note: Select just a few of the most relevant examples—from this list or your own additions—to highlight for your customer.>Facebook. According to the FastCompany 2011 list of the world’s most innovative companies, “In 2010, Facebook grew its U.S. user base by 145%, beating out Google as the top Internet destination.” They report that the company is valued at $50 billion and saw $1.2 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2010. In an interview about innovation, Mark Zuckerberg, creator and CEO of Facebook, says the company has a directive to “move fast and break things.”Skype. Skype, the largest provider of Internet-based voice communications, is unlike other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services because it uses a peer-to-peer system rather than a client-server system. An article by TeleGeography published in early 2011 shows the impact that Skype is having on long-distance communications: Skype usage for cross-border calling was “projected to grow by an astonishing 45 billion minutes in 2010—more than twice the volume added by all of the world’s phone companies, combined.”Amazon Kindle. According to IDC, the Amazon Kindle was the world’s leading e-reader in the second quarter of 2011 with a 51.7 percent share of the market segment. The Kindle has played such an influential role in how people read books that e-books began outselling printed books on Amazon in May 2011.Groupon.Groupon, the company that pioneered online “group coupons,” started in 2008 and by April 2010 was valued at $1.35 billion. According to a Forbes article, this young company is “on pace to pull in $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history.” Groupon CEO Andrew Mason explains, “What we're trying to do is fundamentally change the way that people buy from local businesses in the same way that e-commerce has changed the way that people buy products.”USAA mobile banking. USAA was the first major bank to enable customers to deposit checks using an Internet connection and a scanner. They decided to extend that capability to smartphones and became the first major bank to offer an application that uses the phone’s built-in camera to take pictures of checks for deposit. After the application launched in August 2009, over a million USAA customers had deposited more than 3 million checks worth $2 billion by the end of 2010—representing 14 percent of monthly deposits at the bank.Apple iPhone. The iPhone changed the game when it comes to smartphones. Perhaps even more significant is the iPhone App Store, which introduced a new way to distribute software and thereby enabled a community of smaller developers to reach a mass market. Dyson vacuum cleaners. Dyson introduced a new approach to vacuum cleaners to overcome the problem of losing suction to clogged filters. The design, inspired by a giant cyclone at a local sawmill, saw 5,000 prototypes before release and took just 22 months to become the best-selling vacuum in the United Kingdom.Netflix. Since its launch in 2002, Netflix has grown to what FastCompany describes as a “$9 billion powerhouse.” The success of its subscription-based model—originally by mail but now streaming to more than 200 devices—saw stock prices increase 229 percent in 2010. Nissan Leaf. The Nissan Leaf is the world’s first mass-market fully electric car. It sold more than 15,000 units globally within nine months of its launch and has won numerous awards, including the 2011 World Car of the Year award. The award jurors described the car as “the gateway to a brave new electric world.” SPOT Satellite Messenger. The SPOT Satellite Messenger lets users send text, email, and their location to friends, family, and emergency services through satellite technology. In 2008, it was awarded the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the consumer electronics category as an innovation that broke new ground and demonstrated a measureable impact.Microsoft® Kinect™ sensor. Kinect is one of the best examples of innovation coming out of Microsoft recently. Kinect brings gesture- and voice-based computing to the mass market, initially through gaming. This product has been so popular that it sold 8 million units in its first 60 days on the market, earning it a Guinness World Record for being the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever.Innovation isn’t always about “all new” products, services, processes, and business models. Some of the most successful innovations take existing ideas and adapt them to a new concept. The Dyson vacuum cleaner is a great example of this, drawing from the cyclone extractors at sawmills to create a better suction system for vacuums. Some call this “the adjacent possible”: finding new uses and applications for the ideas and knowledge already around us. Steven Johnson, author of the book Where Good Ideas Come From, argues that this kind of innovation—the cobbling together of different ideas—is really far more common than that flash of inspiration or “Eureka!” moment so often associated with the innovation process. Additional Information:Facebook:“The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2011.” Fast Company. 2011. http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/profile/facebook.php“Mark Zuckerberg, Moving Fast And Breaking Things.” Business Insider. October 14, 2010. http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-2010-10Blodgett, Henry. “Ignore The Screams--Facebook's Aggressive Approach Is Why It Will Soon Become The Most Popular Site In The World.” Business Insider. May 17, 2010. http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-privacy-innovation-2010-5Skype:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype“International long-distance slumps, while Skype soars.” TeleGeography. January 6, 2011. http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2011/01/06/international-long-distance-slumps-while-skype-soars/Amazon Kindle:“Media Tablet and eReader Markets Beat Second Quarter Targets, Forecast Increased for 2011,” IDC Press Release. September 14, 2011. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23034011Rapaport, Lisa. “Amazon.com Says Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Printed Books for First Time.” Bloomberg. May 19, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-19/amazon-com-says-kindle-electronic-book-sales-surpass-printed-format.htmlGroupon:Steiner, Christopher. “Meet The Fastest Growing Company Ever.” Forbes Magazine. August 30, 2010. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/entrepreneurs-groupon-facebook-twitter-next-web-phenom.htmlWeiss, Bari. “Groupon's $6 Billion Gambler.” Wall Street Journal. December 20, 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704828104576021481410635432.html?KEYWORDS=Groupon“The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2011.” Fast Company. 2011. http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/profile/groupon.phpUSAA mobile banking: Overby, Stephanie. “iPhone Banking: How USAA Launched New Mobile Apps for Customers.” CIO. February 23, 2011. http://www.cio.com/article/667614/iPhone_Banking_How_USAA_Launched_New_Mobile_Apps_for_CustomersApple iPhoneWeintraub, Seth. “Apple's biggest innovation for 2008? The iPhone App Store.” Computerworld. August 7, 2008. http://blogs.computerworld.com/apples_biggest_innovation_for_2008_the_apps_storeDyson vacuum cleanershttp://www.dyson.com/insidedyson/default.asp#storyofstruggleNetflix“The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2011.” Fast Company. 2011. http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/profile/netflix.phpNissan Leafhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_LeafThompson, Chrissie. “Nissan, GE team up to connect electric cars to power grid, homes.” Detroit Free Press. October 1, 2011. http://www.freep.com/article/20111001/BUSINESS01/110010323/Nissan-GE-team-up-connect-electric-cars-power-grid-homesKluger, Jeffrey. “The 50 Best Inventions of 2009.” Time. November 12, 2009. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003_1933970,00.htmlSPOT Satellite Messengerhttp://www.findmespot.net.nz/awards.htmlMicrosoft KinectVance, Ashlee. “With Kinect, Microsoft Aims for a Game Changer.” The New York Times. October 23, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/business/24kinect.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_kinectJohnson, Steven. “Where good ideas come from.” TED Talks. September 2010. http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html
- Timing: 5 minutes Presenter Guidance:Where applicable and possible, customize this slide with examples that are relevant to your customer’s business and industry. The goal is to highlight recognizable innovations that were not the result of a formal innovation program. Key Points:Enterprises commonly concentrate their innovation efforts on isolated innovation teams. However, sometimes the best ideas come from the people most directly connected with the day-to-day business. By opening up the innovation pipeline to a broader community of employees, partners, and customers, enterprises can tap into the power of collaborative brainstorming and creativity, fostering a culture of innovation.Script:People are at the heart of innovation. The old adage “two heads are better than one” is certainly true when it comes to innovative thinking and idea generation. More heads are even better. One key to driving innovation is to tap into the creative thinking and on-the-floor, real-world experience of your employees (and even partners and customers) who will often spot opportunities and envision possibilities based on their day-to-day exposure to your business processes, products, services, and market. In fact, a U.S. Gallup survey found that engaged employees actually inspire company innovation: they are more likely to think “outside the box” and “suggest or develop creative ways to improve management and business processes.” Sometimes the best ideas come about outside of formal, isolated innovation teams. Formal innovation teams are a common way to generate new ideas—but not the only way. Although there is unquestionable value in having resources dedicated to innovation, by widening the idea pipeline and fostering a culture of innovation in your organization, you can tap into much broader sources for inspiration and creativity. The engaged employees in the Gallup survey weren’t assigned the task of innovation. Their passion helped them proactively solve problems and identify opportunities. Consider the following examples of innovations that were envisioned and realized by individuals outside of a formal “innovation assignment”:User innovation. In the book Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel explores how the sport of kitesurfing began and evolved. It grew up as more and more individuals began playing with the combination of a board and “kite.” Commercial manufacturers began producing kitesurfing equipment designed specifically for the sport. At the same time, users were sharing their own designs through a dedicated online forum for users and user-innovators. As von Hippel reports, “the collective user effort was probably superior in quality and quantity to the product-development work carried out by all manufacturers in the industry taken together.” And it was not long before a manufacturer began using the freely available users’ designs in lieu of investing in its own R&D, enabling it to sell its products—which aligned directly with user requirements since the users designed them—at a much lower price.Independent invention. The barcode is such a part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a time without it, but its introduction had a massive impact on the retail industry. The very first barcode was invented through a collaboration of two friends. A graduate student overheard a conversation between the president of a grocery store and a dean at his school about the need for a system to automatically read product information at the checkout. That graduate student and his friend independently set off to develop a solution to the problem, and they filed their patent application the following year.On-the-job “bootlegging.” Bootlegging in the context of business refers to when employees independently, outside of a formal mandate, pursue their own innovations at work, often using company resources. Although bootlegging traditionally is done in secret without management approval or sanction, in some cases companies actually encourage staff to pursue their ideas (“permitted bootlegging”). 3M Post-it Notes. One of the best-known examples of permitted bootlegging is the example of 3M Post-it Notes. A 3M chemist created the low-tack, reusable adhesive during the course of his work, but the invention never gained traction. However, another staff member, who had attended a presentation on the adhesive, had the idea of using it to hold his bookmarks in place in his hymnbook. He developed the idea for Post-it Notes from there through 3M’s permitted bootlegging policy.BMW 12-cylinder engine. In contrast, the BMW 12-cylinder engine was developed without management approval (though in an environment that, unofficially, encouraged underground projects). The engine was developed over several years by some “motor aficionados.” Once revealed outside the company, it gained public approval and “contributed significantly to BMW’s brand image of innovative automobile excellence.”Global positioning system (GPS). The example of the GPS lies somewhere in between unsanctioned and permitted bootlegging. In 1957, when Sputnik was launched, two researchers at the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University figured out that they could use the Doppler effect to pinpoint the satellite’s position. From there, they got permission to use the lab’s computer to map the trajectory of the satellite around the earth. Although all of this was an unofficial side project, it led to a fully sanctioned activity: their boss asked them to apply the same theory in reverse—that is, figure out an unknown location on the ground based on the known location of a satellite.It’s not enough to simply hope for breakthrough employee innovations. To really tap into the potential for employees to contribute to innovation, the key is to actively work to foster a culture of innovation—to create an environment that encourages, supports, and enables collaborative, creative, innovative thinking. Additional Information:“Gallup Study: Engaged Employees Inspire Company Innovation.” Gallup Management Journal. October 12, 2006. http://gmj.gallup.com/content/24880/gallup-study-engaged-employees-inspire-company.aspxKitesurfing: von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htmBarcode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode3M Post-it Notes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_noteBMW 12-cylinder engine: Augsdorfer, Peter. “Managing the unmanageable: research into bootleg research concludes that managers should leave creative processes in the underground world and formal processes in the official world.” CBS Interactive Business Network Resource Library. 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6714/is_4_51/ai_n29445675/GPS: Johnson, Steven. “Where good ideas come from.” TED Talks. September 2010. http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html (12:28); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps
- Timing: 7 minutes Key Points:At Microsoft, we take a comprehensive approach to our innovation efforts. Six core tenets guide everything that we do:Hiring the best peopleEmbracing disruptionsA balance of invention, re-invention, and evolutionA commitment to openness and partnershipsA focus on scaleA long-term approachScript:How to foster a culture of innovation varies based on the business model, industry, and structure of an organization. There is no exact formula. At Microsoft, because we are a highly decentralized organization, our innovation activities are dispersed throughout the company and range from highly formal programs to more informal collaborations. We take a comprehensive approach to innovation and invention, guided at all times by six core tenets:Hiring the best people. Invention and innovation occur when smart, passionate, and creative people from different backgrounds come together in an environment that enables new ideas to flourish. At Microsoft, we pride ourselves on hiring and retaining brilliant men and women from a diverse, global talent pool and empowering them to work together with the utmost collaborative freedom. Our goal is to create a melting pot of ideas where developers, designers, testers, researchers, ethnographers, writers, architects, artists, economists, cinematographers, and others are encouraged to push boundaries, explore the toughest questions, and advance the state of the art as they work together to turn today’s dreams into tomorrow’s reality.Embracing disruptions. For people to come up with the best and most creative ideas, they need the freedom to take risks. Several programs at Microsoft are designed to help them do just that. Our technology and business incubation groups—including Office Labs and FUSE Labs (FUSE stands for “future social experiences”)—were created to take risks, to “fail fast, learn faster.” These highly nimble organizations enable Microsoft to react rapidly to disruptive trends and developments. They help us quickly bring amazing new experiences to market that become possible as technology advances and new ideas emerge. The Garage is a company-wide program in which employees come together during their free time to collaborate on grassroots invention, tinkering, ideas, and project incubation. Most of the ideas remain internal or feed into future Microsoft products. However, the recently launched Mouse Without Borders program from The Garage (which lets up to four PCs sync into one unit) is an exception to the rule: it’s its own program, available freely to the public. And bothThinkSpace and ThinkWeek open our innovation pipeline to all of Microsoft’s employees. ThinkSpace is an online forum through which all employees can contribute ideas on self-directed topics, as well as comment on or vote for others’ ideas. ThinkWeek is an annual program that has a formal process through which employees can submit an idea paper on focused topics. A balance of invention, re-invention, and evolution. Our approach is both broad and balanced, spanning invention, re-invention, and evolution. The balance across these activities is essential to our ability to transform ideas into innovations that provide real impact. We seek to invent entirely new product categories. In the process, we sometimes pioneer entirely new businesses and markets, not only for Microsoft but for the entire industry. For example, with Kinect—the gesture- and voice-based Xbox® 360 controller we launched last year—we’ve introduced something entirely new. As our CEO Steve Ballmer puts it, “there’s nothing like it on the market.” We also seek to re-invent, taking existing ideas from inside and outside the company and rethinking them as we incorporate new technologies and anticipate changing customer requirements. The Windows® operating system is a great example of a product that we have re-invented multiple times as technology has advanced: with Windows 95, we introduced a version of the operating system that no longer had the MS-DOS® operating system running under it. With Windows XP, we again introduced a new underlying architecture, representing a blending of Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows 95. We constantly evolve our products, refining and honing them while adding new capabilities that are themselves new inventions. Consider Microsoft SharePoint® collaboration software, one of our core business productivity server applications. With the cloud revolutionizing IT as we know it, we have evolved SharePoint to include SharePoint Online, an entirely cloud-based version of the product. A commitment to openness and partnerships. More complex than ever, technology continues to extend across more fields of science and into more areas of human endeavor. This ever-expanding complexity means no single company can have all the answers. That’s why we work closely with more than 640,000 partner organizations and collaborate with researchers, academics, and institutions in every region across the globe. Through these partnerships—and by encouraging creativity and entrepreneurship through programs such as the BizSpark™ global program for startups and the Imagine Cup (programs run through our global Microsoft Innovation Centers)—we hope to play a key role in nurturing tomorrow’s important technology innovations. A focus on scale. It can be thrilling to dream up great new ideas, but they are nothing more than dreams until they are translated into products and services that deliver real value to people. At Microsoft, we have always made it a special mission to unlock the power of each generation’s most advanced digital technology tools for as many people as possible. We have hundreds of millions of customers in over 190 countries, and a key litmus test for any idea before we commercialize it is how well it will scale to serve those customers. A long-term approach. We have always believed deeply in the importance of research and development. With more than 850 scientists and researchers working in labs around the world, Microsoft Research (MSR) is focused on advancing the state of the art in computing through a combination of basic and applied research. MSR researchers look over the horizon and beyond today’s products to imagine what might come next. They also collaborate closely with our product groups: almost every product in our portfolio includes contributions from MSR. Additional Information:Vance, Ashlee. “With Kinect, Microsoft Aims for a Game Changer.” The New York Times. October 23, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/business/24kinect.html