If you had told me 4 years ago that
I would be working for a real estate company, I would first have laughed and
then said: “No way!”. If you had told me that I would be doing technology R&D
and innovation for them, I would have expressed open scientism. Et voilà! Here
I am, 2011 and working for a real estate company as head of their European IT
R&D group.
I think that non technology
companies starting to invest in novel technology and aiming at creating their
own is simply a sign of the major changes the economy and the market have had
in the past years. The last economic boom and crisis, during the post .com era,
came from an overinflated technology sector. This current crisis comes, from my
perspective, from the mismanagement of resources and investments, from human
greediness to get a lot from nothing.
Behaving and working as we have done
in the past does not seem enough. Doing things differently seems the only
option! Technology companies struggle to get the human and the business side of
their clients and customers. Business and non-technology
sectors struggle to get the most out of the investments they do not consider
core to their business (like technology). Technology companies are moving into business
services, closer to the human-need side of their clients. Looking at that
evolution it does not seem such a foolish idea for a company whose core
business is not technology to start exploring how technology can bring it one
step closer to its clients.
I feel I am the guinea pig of my employer's experiment!
We’ll see how it turns out. So far, I am really liking it. J
