Genpact Limited is collaborating with the Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), a research unit of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which examines how the latest technologies are changing the way people work together. The goal of this expanded collaboration is to generate non-incremental innovation in information-based operations through a new online community enabling the crowdsourcing of ideas. The Intelligent Operations Exchange (IOX) community helps participants “stumble into” innovative uses of leading edge technologies in business process operations.
The Genpact and MIT CCI collaboration first began in 2012 to identify novel technology-based practices for process operations, and contributed to the maturation of groundbreaking practices such as Operations Network Analytics which applies big data social network analysis to large organizations in order to improve the effectiveness of operations.
IOX’s unprecedented use of “crowdstorming” (crowdsourcing + brainstorming) drives a deliberate collision of creative and serendipitous perspectives of thousands of people with diverse backgrounds such as industry experts, MIT scientists, Genpact practitioners, and clients. When confronted with novel technologies and asked to find applicability in their own world, this community will become the first place for process operations professionals to unleash their creativity.
The IOX community is exploring the application to business process operations of technologies across hardware, software, and analytics – such as wearable devices and remote-controlled telepresence robots, personal automated assistants, rapid automation, and collective intelligence activities like prediction markets. Genpact, MIT CCI, and the community will continuously evaluate and select high-potential ideas for further investment and development.
“Our center’s mission is to gain a deeper understanding of internet-enabled collective intelligence,” said Robert Laubacher, Associate Director of CCI. “We’re excited to work with Genpact to apply this approach in the realm of intelligent operations.”
“The underlying pace of technological change is accelerating and the real obstacle to change is the ability of leaders to re-imagine the fabric of their business processes and make their operations ‘intelligent’ – able to predict, act, and learn from experience,” said Gianni Giacomelli, senior vice president for product innovation and chief marketing officer, Genpact. “With MIT’s Center for Collective intelligence, we want to ‘innovate innovation’ in a space where subject-matter experts often silo themselves into narrow domains, dampening the power of a key ingredient of innovation: diversity.”
The collaboration will involve senior executives from the Genpact Research Institute on Intelligent Operations, a specialized think tank already harnessing the collective intelligence of Genpact, its clients and partners. The Genpact Research Institute conducts research on important topics related to the future of enterprises’ operating models, from front to back office, across nine industries.