Editor's Note: The End of Time

If only Paul Horn had talked about the things we expect scientists to want to talk about, we could have kept him off our cover this month. But he didn't. He never once mentioned black holes or stem cells. There was no eulogizing of Copernicus or ridiculing of Stephen Hawking.
Instead, IBM's research chief responded to our questions with laserlike focus, and seemed to garner a degree of satisfaction that he was being asked about something he not only grasped in great depth, but also seemingly cared about.
Frankly, this came as a surprise to us. We had little doubt that Horn would offer up the goods — an obligatory sentence or two underscoring why IBM Research was an important partner of IBM Global Services — but we thought it would end there. It didn't. Before we were escorted out of IBM's flagship Yorktown Heights laboratory, Horn had treated us to an hour-long discourse on the unique challenges and intricacies of converting a "time-selling" professional services firm into an "asset-based" one. It's a conversion that is now paramount, if Global Services is to become the vast "channel for innovation" its management envisions, and Horn's people are now playing a key role in helping develop the methodologies and practices Global Services will require to make the change.
This is a role IBM Research has recently gained wide acclaim for within the company's varied product divisions, where the flow of innovation has advanced steadily since the mid-1990s, and where strategies for growing innovation assets can today be lifted and applied elsewhere. These strategies or templates are the raw materials now being used to lay the rails that will someday routinely carry innovation deep into Global Services.
Having little data available to assess the success of this effort, we could only look and listen to the company's leadership. What we found, we believe is coverworthy.
Even if Paul Horn had never told us that driving innovation into Global Services was his top priority in the coming year (which he did), we would have easily known by the minute details he parted with and the satisfaction he emitted while sharing them. In the end, we felt an urgency to share with you what we had learned — and to speculate on what it means for the consulting marketplace going forward.
Our reporting drew one inescapable conclusion: If you are a consulting firm that relies largely on selling time and ignores the more tangible value of research, time is no longer on your side.