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Open Innovation, or is Business War?
The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation†and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.†The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw some money at universities.†Somewhere along the way unfortunately, a sophisticated reconstruction of the logic of innovation becomes reduced to quick-money recipes.
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Here is the obvious conclusion that Chesbrough is unwilling to draw from his own theory: if intellectual property moves around in an economy through the clumsy and cumbersome process of trade, things get drastically slowed down. The solution isn’t just more trade. It is faster trade, and sometimes, free sharing.
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Enterprise 2.0 SaaS: Customer Benefit or Vendor Convenience?
However, SaaS is not an optimal solution for every business problem and every customer. Providers need to look in the mirror and be brutally honest with themselves about the motivations around their SaaS strategy and its relevancy to the customer. I’ve already heard of instances of business changing hands between E2.0 vendors at this early stage in the game, for these very reasons.
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Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural
It is much easier to use product managers to create a repeatable process. After all, there is much less passion involved. For many markets, it may not be worth Apple-style design. People often wonder for Enteprise software whether it matters, for example. But I don’t buy my PM friend’s argument. Talent of all kinds is always scarce. A decision to eschew finding talent for a repeatable process creates mediocrity.
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Reinventing Silos
Blogs and wikis provide specific formats to content. There are behavioral format clues that differentiate a blog from a wiki, but under the covers it’s all content. Content elements have value beyond the formats and applications that hold them hostage — they’re enterprise assets that can be repurposed in other formats. The specific format of content (.pdf .doc .html) is really only relevant for consumption — to associate the ‘viewing’ of the content with an application that can display it. The semantics of the content itself doesn’t really care about the format (don’t hold me to that when I’m telling you how to create semantically-relevant formats), just ask your favorite search engine — it’s all words to them.
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Consider a simple ‘hostage’ example (one that I’ve been aghast as many UX designers have missed the significance of), a UI with the labels “Blog†and “Wiki†as two separate options for navigation.
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Sure, 2.0 technologies can increase transparency across organizations, but that’s all lost as you move across ‘closed’ solutions or formats, with no architectural layer to synthesize it all. One silo is simply replaced by another.
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Notes from Enterprise 2.0: Still looking for End User Adoption
What I did not hear from these groups are the three things that I think are crucial to encouraging use amongst the rank and file:
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Helping business leaders map out what specific business problem the tool will solve
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Providing assistance in re-engineering the business process that will be served by the tool.
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Embedding the tool within areas that the information workers live.
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Connecting ideas with communities – Annotated
I use the chasm model to explain my professional work of 1) seeing what is ready to cross the chasm by 2) staying connected to the innovators & being an early adopter so that 3) I can help mainstream organizations. It’s a good graphic summary of my consulting practice.
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Adopt Intranet 2.0 or risk failure
An organization without a 2.0 strategy risks being left behind, or outright failure (though death may be slow). Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.
561 organizations of all sizes from across the planet participated in the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and the results reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.
Once a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in the Western World.
Intranet blogs, wikis and discussion forums are quite pervasive, while other less common tools such as podcasts and mashups remain an after-thought at most organizations:
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Management 2.0 : quel rôle pour le management de proximité dans les organisations collaboratives
Ce sujet n’est pas neutre, ces managers vont être les principaux relais dans la mise en place de communautés ou de plateforme collaborative dans votre organisation. Les avoir contre vous, c’est la garantie de l’échec de votre projet. Maintenant, il ne faut pas se leurrer, dans une organisation collaborative, le rôle traditionnel de ce management va évoluer, il ne peut pas demeurer le même. Comme le disait Peter Drucker : “90% de ce que nous nommons le management consiste à compliquer le travail des collaborateurs. Dans un nouveau monde de management, je vois l’employé gérer sa charge de travail et demander un soutien à un coach quand il en a besoin”. Ce n’est pas sans rappeler le fonctionnement d’une entreprise collaborative.
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Death of the middle managers: thinking of Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture Change
They were not responsible for giving reports work to do. Instead a resource pool operated with resourcing managers identifying staff with the right skills mix to quickly staff-up and tear down projects. Consultants had to proactively go about managing their career, promoting themselves and finding their next job.
This, I believe will become the new model of the corporation in a Web 2.0 world. And the fact of the matter is this model exists today in many consulting firms.
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Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 2.
Internal communities contain members who are employees of a company. They are paid and can be fired. The panelists touched upon many issues and gave excellent advice.
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Productivity in a Networked Era – Assessing ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction)
Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.
The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.
The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.
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ROI is an accounting and financial management concept businesses use to decide where to make investments and to assess the success of investment decisions after the fact. ROI reduces both return — R, what you expect back — and investment — I, what you expect to put in to numbers — making it possible to compare one investment opportunity to another. The numbers tie back to categories on the balance sheet and income statement, (i.e. tangible assets and hard-dollar returns).
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Measuring intangibles involves making judgment calls, so managers often exclude intangibles from their ROI calculations. Several purported authorities on calculating ROI suggest taking intangibles into account by putting them on a list but refusing to estimate their value. This leads you to comparing numbers to words, apples to oranges.
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Executives manage immeasurable things all the time. The more powerful the executive, the more likely he or she is involved in effectiveness — doing the right things rather than doing things right. Intuition, judgment and gut feelings guide these more important decisions. Qualitative assessment often can make up for a concrete numeric result.
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Collaborative Enterprise: Enterprise 2.0 & The Flywheel
My triggering point for this post was a post by Peter Bergman in the Harvard Business blogs on the best way to change corporate culture. It is in many ways a recapitulation of fundamental issues organizations face on the cultural side. He says: “Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities. In most organizations these elements develop unconsciously and organically to create a system that, while not always ideal, works.”
What all of this really boils down is two things – human and social capital. Toyota in my view could be one such company – the robust and high performance knowledge sharing network they have built across their supply chain is a case in point. See research paper here .
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“Toyota’s network has solved three fundamental dilemmas with regard to knowledge sharing by devising methods to (1) motivate members to participate and openly share valuable knowledge (while preventing undesirable spillovers to competitors), (2) prevent free riders, and (3) reduce the costs associated with finding and accessing different types of valuable knowledge
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Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen.”
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Could Toyota have done this better with E2.0 technologies? Looks like it would have helped them accelerate this journey but then it would have been possible only because they had a strong cultural and business foundation.
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The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management
Community managers are human and imperfect. Here are the Seven Deadly Sins that community managers are sometimes guilty of:
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
