SINGAPORE--Research and development (R&D) in the technology landscape will move toward collaboration among industry partners, according to IBM's head honcho.
Speaking at Singapore's IDA Distinguished Infocomm speaker series today, Samuel Palmisano, IBM's chairman, president and CEO, said: "From [a] R&D perspective, I think more and more of what's going to happen in the future is one of collaboration."
Palmisano explained that "very few" private enterprises today can afford to allocate four to five percent of their revenues in research and development. As such, people have created alternative business models that are not based on R&D, he said, adding that technology breakthroughs need to come out of "fundamental science".
The Cell Broadband Engine chip, for instance, was a result of collaboration between IBM, Sony and Toshiba, and has been used in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console.
Big Blue has also teamed up with Brazil-based multiplayer online game company Hoplon Infotainment to integrate the Cell Broadband Engine processor with mainframes and the virtual world infrastructure software, bitVerse.
In February this year, Big Blue announced that it has discovered a way to construct a critical part of the transistor with a new material, dubbed "high-k metal gate", which it described as the "first fundamental change to basic transistor in forty years". This was also a result of collaborative effort from a team of development partners, including AMD, Sony and Toshiba.
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