Paul Melchiorre, Ariba’s VP of Strategy had a chance to sit down with Vinnie Mirchandani, former Gartner analyst, and author of The New Polymath, being published by Wiley in June, to discuss how the book’s contents could apply to the sourcing community.

Paul Melchiorre (PM): To start with. what is a New Polymath?

Vinnie Mirchandani (VM): Paul, Polymath is Greek for a Renaissance Man like Leonardo Da Vinci or Ben Franklin - someone good at many skills. The New Polymath, in the book’s definition, is an enterprise good at many technologies and at leveraging multiple talent pools. It is an enterprise which has learned to blend 3, 5, 10 strands of infotech, biotech, cleantech etc. to come up with compound new solutions which we could not have delivered a few years ago.

An example is BASF which is bringing together genetic databases in Germany and RFID chips, high speed cameras, robotics in a greenhouse in Belgium as it seeks to bioengineer a better strain of rice. GE has announced plans for the Net Zero home - as in zero utility bills. The concept brings together solar, wind, fuel cell, smart meters, smart appliances and many more technologies from across its various business units. Hospira, the medical devices company packages scanners, next gen displays, check-and-balance software and access to drug libraries in its next-gen infusion pump system. In each case, you can see a wide range of technologies being brought together in a creative bundling process.

In IT, it is someone like salesforce.com which from its inception did not just write code but also learned to run data centers, did application management and upgrades for its customers. Historically, as you know software companies have outsourced their hosting, systems integration and offshore application services to their partners. Now with SaaS gathering steam. software companies are starting to put it together. Salesforce.com and others like NetSuite have been doing it for over a decade!

The broadening palette of technology components - many increasingly affordable, allows us to take a fresh look at many problems. The two biggest takeaways from the book are a) Stretch your stretch goals. and b) Adopt an AND not OR attitude towards technology. We have too many silos across IT, biotech etc. Even within IT we have so many silos.

PM: What changes in the business world have necessitated these New Polymath traits?

VM: Our challenges in work, life and play are exponentially more complex than they were in the times of Da Vinci and Franklin. We are screaming for new medicine, new energy, new algorithms. All with ever shrinking budgets. We have so many “Grand Challenges”.

That does not mean everyone needs to be involved in “boil the ocean” projects. But in every aspect of life, it would go a long way if we adopted an AND not OR mindset.

So, in software look at all the possible interfaces increasingly available - voice, surface, haptic, brain-machine, not just make the mouse/keyboard based GUI prettier. When it comes to analytics, don’t tweak traditional business intelligence, but look at predictive, web and other analytics and emerging forms of data visualization. When it comes to development and testing, get used to communities and crowds as sources of talent, not just employees and contractors. When you look overseas for talent, don’t just look at India. One of the case studies in the book, Cognizant describes how they are consistently leveraging talent pools in Argentina, Hungary, Philippines, US, India and and and…

Check back for Part 2 of the interview, where Vinnie shares how The New Polymath applies to spend management professionals.