At the heart of current matters, the topic of company competitiveness is a very lively one. Even though companies tend to consider innovation with a costs and performance-oriented approach, it remains an essential factor of competitive differentiation. Olivier Bourrouilh, CEO of ROK Solution, a collaborative intelligence platform aiming to promote innovation and performance optimization for companies, shares his point of view on competitiveness. Hello Olivier and thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Let’s start with a simple one: When we talk about competitiveness, what is truly at stake for companies? Olivier Bourrouilh: Today, competitiveness is about perimeters. Companies follow the logic of globalization, custom barriers are falling, and competition is fiercer than ever. Gaining a competitive edge is crucial for companies to survive in this constantly evolving environment, and all companies, SMEs and larger CAC 40 companies alike, need to integrate this concept into their organization. This advantage can be achieved with two different approaches: Cost-driven competitive advantage: Optimizing costs is an essential factor for competitiveness. If the cost for prime materials increases, so will overall expenses. Wage costs follow the same logic. In a number of cases, cost reduction cannot depend only on management. In order to decrease overall expenses, companies need to produce better and more efficiently. Processing, managing, measuring and optimizing organizations becomes essential. Innovation-driven competitive advantage: In a market environment where competition is constantly evolving, innovation is essential to gain and keep a strong competitive edge, by offering unique services, or better-performing production processes. Can you tell us about ROK Solution? ROK Solution is a Collaborative Intelligence software solution aiming to improve company competitiveness, by acting on two essential aspects: organization optimization and innovation. ROK may be one among many other business applications on the market, but unlike others, it is based on SaaS Cloud technology, which allows it to adapt better and provide more flexibility to client companies. ROK is also an integrated solution that seeks to improve, drive and manage all the existing company applications, thus breaking barriers and silos between various company departments. ROK Solution makes it easier for all business operators to integrate the solution into their system without needing any IT intervention (iBPMS approach). In other words, ROK is an integrated collaborative intelligence solution that provides both financial and technological flexibility, involving little to no change management. What makes ROK Solution so innovative? ROK Solution is innovative both as a concept, and as a technology. An innovative concept: ROK’s innovative concept provides a new approach to collaboration. Often seen only through the prism of web 2.0 tech and social networks implemented just for the sake of it, collaboration only makes sense for ROK if companies are able to model relations between individuals in an ecosystem. Modeling relations between individuals means using workflow tools on a collaborative platform (lighter client), which also needs to include BPM, BPA and VoIP tools. ROK shifts paradigms: the ability to model relations and provide business references (ROK Store) is now a prerequisite to building a successful social network. Innovative technology ROK Solution has already gained a head start on the market, and our teams have worked relentlessly on light client interfaces. As an example, ROK was one of the first solutions developed on Silverlight, at a time when Microsoft’s solution was still in its early stages. Similarly, ROK has developed a tile view interface module, similar to Windows 8’s today. Innovation is at the heart of ROK’s philosophy, down to its actual kernel. Our organic and systemic approach is present in our kernel’s patented architecture. This approach is different from all the existing IT methods, and offers unequaled performance, particularly in terms of rights management. How can ROK help companies promote innovation? Innovation can consist in sitting down by a tree and waiting for apples to fall on your head (innovation driven by randomness), or in an organized brainstorming, with collaborators of varied skills, pooling their knowledge together to meet a specific goal. Everybody brings their experience and vision to create new ideas that individuals could not have come up with alone. The main flaw in the existing collaborative solutions on the market is their lack of structure. ROK, on the contrary, allows to innovate by creating the conditions for efficient knowledge sharing, facilitating synergy and translating this knowledge (guidelines) into application components. Collective knowledge becomes collaborative, generating real value, and helping to reach competitiveness goals. Thank you Olivier for these answers. Contact ROK Solution now for a free demo of their platform. Tune in for our live web conferences on important business topics. Thank you for your attention, and see you soon!
