The Innovation Agenda for the Global Outsourcing Industry

Market leadership demands responsibility for continuous improvement. It demands innovation.

For innovation to occur, we must put creative insight into action. Only then, will ideas make a genuine difference, resulting in new or altered business processes within the industry or changes in the products and services provided.

As the leading advisor to enterprises that are making strategic use of outsourcing as part of their agenda for enhanced competitiveness and sustained improvements, TPI is privileged for the relationships we hold with some of the most ambitious organizations in the world — clients, law firms and service providers alike. These relationships uniquely equip us with detailed insight on successful contracting conventions — those that results in true win-win relationships – as well as the lessons gleaned from changing market circumstances.

The global outsourcing industry is a constantly evolving ecosystem, with the experiences of each successive relationship informing the buy-side and sell-side approaches of the participants. TPI recently formalized a program of collecting and synthesizing the experiences of outsourcing clients, their service providers, accomplished law firms and TPI’s expert advisors in order to inform an Innovation Agenda for the global outsourcing industry.

The Innovation Agenda is driven by the experiences of first-generation outsourcing agreements; the fact that aspects of the industry are changing in material ways; and as a result of new levels of expectation held by clients and service providers. Some of the more notable influences on the establishment of the Innovation Agenda include:

  • Increasing tendency toward multi-sourcing strategies, with multiple service providers engaged across a spectrum of business support functions and geographies
  • Rapid adoption of global service delivery platforms, with attendant opportunities for flexible contracting relationships
  • Shorter-duration contracting terms, reducing the risks associated with long-term agreements but also potentially restricting the upside
  • Dramatic increase in service provider diversity, across service families, industries and geographies
  • Gaining popularity of provider-defined solutions that contrast with historical models of provider-assumed assets and staff, with associated incremental improvements delivered over time
  • Breakthrough potential of transformation in business operations made possible by focused investments and risk-taking on the part of the service provider community

TPI collaborates with clients, law firms and service providers to develop and maintain the Innovation Agenda. Together, we identify areas of improvement associated with the outsourcing contracting process that will yield benefits to the clients and service providers alike. The current Innovation Agenda is comprised of the four original cornerstone topics plus two additional 2007 topics:

  1. Refreshing Certain Contracting Terms & Conditions to Reflect New Center Grounds - (76 KB)
  2. Formal Benchmarking in Outsourcing Contracts: TPI’s Position
    3. - (687 KB)
  3. Gainsharing & Business Value Metrics – in progress
  4. Change Management
  5. Comparing Apples to Oranges: Evaluation Techniques for Distinctive Solutions – in progress
  6. Multi-Sourcing Settings – in progress

As we continue to deliver on the promises of Innovation, we will update and enhance the Innovation Agenda. Refer back to this page to read more about the changing landscape of successful outsourcing conventions.