collaborative software

Mashability to Mashups

jim wilde — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:01:29 +0000

The NY Times has an interesting article about mashups - Do the Mash (Even if You Don't Know All the Steps) "POP music has its mash-ups that combine tunes and vocals from different songs. YouTube viewers do it, too, mixing together segments from various music videos."Anyway, these mashups are happening all over the place using wikis, blogs, collaborative tools, and social networks. The biggest challenge in organizations is getting applications data base opened up using standard api's.From an IBM spokesperson, "People want to be able to write programs to exploit new business opportunities, he said. - Companies have lots of databases they want to make mashable, he said, - and share with their business partners.

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business opportunities

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future market orientation

Radical Innovation Requirements

jim wilde — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:02:14 +0000

The following article is from MIT Sloan "Measuring the Culture of Innovation" A brief synopsis of Innovation in Firms Across Nations: New Metrics and Drivers for Radical Innovation (University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Working Paper No. MKT 03-07, February 2007) by Gerard J. Tellis, Jaideep C. Prabhu and Rajesh K. Chandy Rather, the most important factor driving innovation is the internal culture of the company. Specifically, the researchers found that a future market orientation, a willingness to cannibalize and a tolerance for risk are three cultural elements that have a particularly strong relationship with radical innovation. Organizational tools such as incentives and product champions are also important, though less so. The only other factor that the authors found to be significant is R&D spending, but even that is not as strong as company culture.

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cannibalize

tolerance for risk

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knowledge management

Connect + Develop, podcast

jim wilde — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 11:17:32 +0000

Business development ideas - connect + develop equals VALUE for any size organization, business, or institution. Are You Reaping the Benefits of Web 2.0 - social networks - community software - participation - connecting? Web 2.0 (also referred to as Enterprise 2.0) is reshaping the way businesses of all sizes must operate in order to succeed in a rapidly changing marketplace. Trends like this one are changing customer expectations, buying behaviors, the way products/services are developed, and the pace at which companies must make decisions and even shift directions.

"Finding That 'Sweet Spot': A New Way to Drive Innovation"

Published: June 27, 2007 in Knowledge@Wharton

Larry Huston was vice president of knowledge and innovation for many years at Procter & Gamble. During that time, he was the architect of its Connect + Develop program, the creator of P&G's Brand Bootcamp operation, and innovation leader for the company's global fabric and homecare business, among other initiatives.

Below is an edited version of the podcast.

Knowledge@Wharton: I'd like to start out by asking you, what is the Connect + Develop approach to innovation and why is it innovative?

Huston: Terrific question. You've got to start with: What is innovation in most companies today? For most companies, it's all about inventing everything yourself. Yes, some companies do joint ventures. They mostly do that out of trying to fill in a weakness or a capability gap. But most companies invent everything. Procter & Gamble invented 90% of its innovations. Everything came from basically within the four walls of P&G. We had 9,000 R&D people at Procter & Gamble, but the world has about 1.8 million people who are equal in education and have access to first-class lab facilities, [like] P&G people.

So basically, Connect + Develop is all about redefining our organization as 1,809,000 people -- that 1.8 million plus our 9,000 people -- and then leveraging the intellectual assets and capabilities of the world in a connected model to bring big innovations to our consumers. So it's about connecting, not just inventing. You can think about it as: You want to continue to invent, but you want to connect. It's what you know plus who you know on the outside, so that you can really create a lot of value for your customers or consumers.

I grabbed this from the NY TImes, "The Whole World Is Watching ", By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN.

When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We're all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer Ã¢â‚¬ and each of us so much more transparent.

We can all act on our imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.

Tags:

invented here symdrom

Social Media:

community software management

Using social software to collaborate and connect

jim wilde — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:37:18 +0000

"The good and bad Of Web 2.0 tools", By J. Nicholas, IT News

It once bet its collaboration strategy on Microsoft tools. It's expanded to consider more Web 2.0 tools, but getting them implemented and used is far from easy.

Ever since A.G. Lafley be-came CEO of Procter & Gamble in 2000, he has pushed employees to improve how they collaborate with one another and with partners in order to develop new products faster. With a supportive CEO and today's myriad Web 2.0 options, what possible problems could face Joe Schueller, who's driving P&G's adoption of new collaboration tools? How about e-mail, which Schueller describes as the biggest barrier to employee use of more interactive and effective tools.

I blogged about the "The First Principle of Social Web Apps". It goes like this... "For each Ã¢â‚¬Ëœcomplete' user interaction ... the user must perceive they have received more value than the energy (and attention) expended to complete the task."

So, how do you compete against email when it is soooooooo dam easy to broardcast a message to select users? In my mind this is easy since the tools in social software provide contextual dynamics for broadcasting a message. Think about it. A blog post can be targeted to selected users, tagged, linked, promoted as well as support threaded comments.

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Social Media:

Why Do Good Managers Set Bad Strategies?

jim wilde — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 12:52:33 +0000

Here's an interesting article from Wharton with Michale Porter, the strategy guru. (reg req)

Mr. Porter makes an excellent point with, "...it is important for everyone in the organization to understand the strategy and align everything they do with that strategy every day." Too bad most employees don't have a clue to what strategy is or how it relates to their daily work activities.

"Why Do Good Managers Set Bad Strategies?

...managers need to develop a clear strategy around their company's unique place in the market.

Years ago, corporate strategy was considered a secret known only by top executives for fear competitors might use the information to their advantage, said Porter. Now it is important for everyone in the organization to understand the strategy and align everything they do with that strategy every day. Openness and clarity even help when coping with competition. "It's good for a competitor to know what the strategy is. The chances are better that the competitor will find something else to be unique at, instead of creating a zero-sum competition.""

Consider using an enterprise level social web application (demo) or social networking software to connect employees on a daily basis to business strategy.

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Social Media:

Social networking software gives business the blues.

jim wilde — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:20:32 +0000

Social Networking Software - Community Drivien Sites - Collaborative Tools Creating communities, connecting people, sharing knowledge, capturing ideas, and spurring mashups scares the hell out of most organizations, businesses, and associations. Risky stuff! Be afraid! Community Driven Sites Are Unpredictable. Do you really want to know what employees, customers, suppliers, users, stakeholders, et al., have to say? Do you really want all of these people connecting and sharing ideas, information, knowledge? [...Tools that cast a wide net will capture open minds...] These tools are powerful, situational, productive, and cheap (SaaS model). They can also be set up on intranets and dedicated servers. On the most basic level, all you need is a web browser and an internet connection. [...productive and timely information...] A social network platform pushes and pulls together the wisdom of diverse, independent groups to create - mashups - new contexts that shed light on problems. Social networks are messy and chaotic but generate new ideas, crazy connections, real solutions, more productive and timely information faster than you could ever achieve without one.

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enterprise mashups

Wisdom of crowds vs. Wisdom of the few

jim wilde — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:17:44 +0000

The Washington Post has an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of the few. The sites mentioned in the article are using social software to create communities on the net that harness deep smarts.

"The Top Pickers vs. the Pack"

"The notion of separating the best from the rest is heresy for those who advocate the wisdom of crowds. According to its proponents, a large number of diverse, independent individuals will typically outdo experts because even experts lack perfect information and make mistakes. But with a crowd, the many small pieces of information and perspectives held by individuals come together to form a more complete picture while the mistakes can cancel each other out.

Justin Wolfers, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said collective wisdom -- reflected for instance in the stock prices set jointly by millions of knowledgeable investors in the open market, and in sports betting lines determined by large groups of avid gamblers -- is more likely to be accurate than Web sites claiming to feature experts. Someone must have a track record stretching back decades before it is statistically possible to conclude whether success results from talent or random chance, he said.

"Folks who look like experts today are very likely to be lucky," Wolfers said. "If they're conditioning it only on past history, it's likely to be a lost cause."

Academia studying collective intelligence.

The whole idea of collective intelligence or the wisdom of crowds is starting to get a lot of play on the academic level. MIT is one school delving into collective intelligence.

"While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies especially the Internet now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities."

The irony here is that the blogosphere and the open source software communities continue to push out new ideas and possibilities everyday.

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collective intelligence

Social Media:

start conversations

Web 2.0 Reshaping Business

jim wilde — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:11:07 +0000

Robin Good has an excellent video interview with Alan Moore about web2.0, social network software systems, communities, media, branding and much more. "Web 2.0 - How Networked Media Are Reshaping Business: Alan Moore - Video InterviewWeb 2.0 is reshaping the media and business landscape to an extent unimaginable even a year ago. Alan Moore, seasoned blogger, CEO of community and engagement marketing firm SMLXL (Small Medium Large Extra-Large) and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands."Alan, "The power of social networking cannot be underestimated in establishing a new business, or transforming an established one. Alan cites the example of Spreadshirt.com, who without investment or traditional marketing built their company up to an impressive 200,000 sellers in the space of four years, by tapping into the productive, participatory potential of their userbase. By facilitating the creativity and productivity of their users, Spreadshirt have taken advantage of the power of the network in forging a successful startup. Engage your users, and involve them in every step of the process - this is a model that can be applied to almost any sphere with a little careful thought and planning." From Alan's blog, "The people formerly known as the audience voice their protest at further media consolidation in the US."

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transforming business

Social Media:

start conversations

Creative Collaboration - "We-think"

jim wilde — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:17:14 +0000

There's a new online book from Charles Leadbeater about creative collaboration. I snagged a couple of paragraphs from his site/blog because it jibes with what we've been yaking about, less eloquently, here, here, and here for the last three plus years. "People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines. "

Of course, even to this day and with so much being written about social network software, what many organizations are still failing to understand is that they can achieve similar benfits. FWIW - The process is really simple and cheap to start a pilot project.

Enjoy.

"We-think"

"Google is on the verge [google paid $1.65 billion] bidding £1bn for Youtube, a business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?

"We-think, an exploration of and experiment in collaborative creativity.

"The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is ollaborative. It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time. The number of people who could be participants in these creative conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are not new - peer review for example has been around a long time in academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life, Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale."

I love this stuff. "We can be organizaed without an organization."

Thanks to D. Weinberger for the link.

Tags:

open innovation

participatory culture

social web applications

Social Media:

rich internet applications

"Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration"

jim wilde — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:33:03 +0000

Interesting piece from MIT Sloan about enterprise social networking software. I suppose the uptick or rate of adoption for businesses will accelerate in 2006 and 2007. LOL We've been spouting off about corporate social software, web 2.0 stuff for over three years to businesses that remain clueless. Of course, it's great to see Mr. McAfee introduce and explain Enterprise 2.0 (social-software, web-2.0) concepts in terms, hopefully, managers will GET.

"Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration"

"There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software, which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.

This article offers a paradigm that highlights the salient characteristics of these new technologies, which the author refers to as SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals). [cool acronym - SLATE] The resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Drawing on case studies and survey data, the article offers managers a set of ground rules for implementing the new technologies.

First, it is necessary to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices.
Second, a common platform must be created to allow for a collaboration infrastructure.
Third, an informal rollout of the technologies may be preferred to a more formal procedural change.
And fourth, managerial support and leadership is crucial.

Even when implanted and implemented well, these new technologies will certainly bring with them new challenges. These tools may well reduce management's ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company's leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed."

Andrew P. McAfee is an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Visit the author''s blog for more commentary about Enterprise 2.0 and related topics.

Bonus links: Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning, Leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web

Tags:

enterprise mashups

social web applications

employees

xml

marketing

privacy

gated social networks

customers

knowledge

Social Media:

P&G Connect and Develop Innovation Model

jim wilde — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:10:42 +0000

We believe the ability to communicate and collaborate with people both inside and outside the company is a key business differentiator.

The connect and develop innovation model is one we whole-heartedly embrace since it blends ideas from inside and outside of the organization. We call them mashups. We've been helping business managers and team members establish those models for the last four years using what we learned working with open source software communities and using website services..

The sad thing is that most businesses continue to hold fast to the "invented here" assumptions. This is not going to work much more because the dynamics of economies have changed from: land, labor, materials to people, ideas and things.

Take a look at myspace. Sure, it is wild and messy but look at the connections to what people love - music. Myspace has spawned more successful indie bands in the last 2 years than any time in the entire record industry history! Check out youtube as well.

My hat is off to P&G!

P&G's New Innovation Model, from an article published in Harvard Business Review.

"Most companies are still clinging to what we call the invention model,centered on a bricks-and-mortar R&D infrastructure and the idea that their innovation must principally reside within their own four walls. To be sure, these companies are increasingly trying to buttress their laboring R&D departments with acquisitions, alliances, licensing, and selective innovation outsourcing. And they're launching Skunk Works, improving collaboration between marketing and R&D, tightening go-to-market criteria, and strengthening product portfolio management."

"It was clear to us that our invent-it-ourselves model was not capable of sustaining high levels of top-line growth."

"It was, and still is, a radical idea. As we studied outside sources of innovation, we estimated that for every P&G researcher there were 200 scientists or engineers elsewhere in the world who were just as good a total of perhaps 1.5 million people whose talents we could potentially use. But tapping into the creative thinking of inventors and others on the outside would require massive operational changes. We needed to move the company's attitude from resistance to innovations "not invented here" to enthusiasm for those "proudly found elsewhere." And we needed to change how we defined, and perceived, our R&D organization from 7,500 people inside to 7,500 plus 1.5 million outside, with a permeable boundary between them.

It was against this backdrop that we created our connect and develop
innovation model. With a clear sense of consumers' needs, we could identify promising ideas throughout the world and apply our own R&D, manufacturing, marketing, and purchasing capabilities to them to create better and cheaper products, faster.

The model works. Today, more than 35 percent of our new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from
about 15 percent in 2000. And 45 percent of the initiatives in our product development portfolio have key elements that were discovered externally. Through connect and develop along with improvements in other aspects of innovation related to product cost, design, and marketing our R&D productivity has increased by nearly 60 percent. Our innovation success rate has more than doubled, while the cost of innovation has fallen. R&D investment as a percentage of sales is down from 4.8 percent in 2000 to 3.4 percent today. And, in the last two years, we've launched more than 100 new products for which some aspect of execution came from outside the company. Five years after the company's stock collapse in 2000, we have doubled our share price and
have a portfolio of twenty-two billion-dollar brands."

Bonus links: Lead users and tossing pots and "User innovation toolkits and continuous improvement" by Jon Udell - Inforworld.

Tags:

enterprise mashups

xml

gated social networks

strategy

P&G connect and develop

Social Media:

championing social networks

How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations

jim wilde — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:30:57 +0000

For any employee, manager, founder, et al, I strongly suggest that you read what Ms. Kimball and Mr. Rheingold have to say about social networks and try to figure out (call us) how to get started using one in your orgainzation. I think it is great that Mr. Rheingold back in 2000 was championing social networks in organizations. The funny thing is, it took a bunch of kids on myspace to bust social networks wide open. From what I can remember, the same scenario played out with the adoption of instant messaging.

Check it out for yourself, here's a demo of an enterprise blogging platform.

By Lisa Kimball and Howard Rheingold - ( online social networks. )

Online social networks are webs of relationships that grow from computer-mediated discussions. The webs grow from conversations among people who share a common affinity (e.g., they work for the same company, department, or in the same discipline) and who differ in other ways (e.g., they are in different locations, keep different hours, specialize in different disciplines, work for different companies). When the people are distributed across time and space, then these conversations need to take place online, over an intranet or private internet forum.

Within a company, a well-tuned online social network can enhance the company's collective knowledge and sharpen its ability to act on what people know in time to be effective. We have long recognized that this kind of network is critical to an organization. Creating these opportunities to connect is often the stated or unstated purpose of facilitated off-site meetings and other communication initiatives. However, the half-life of connections made at these meetings was very short until online technology provided us with a means to support the network over time.

Social networks grow from the personal interactions of human beings over time, as well as from from the technological infrastructure that connects those humans. This means that growing a successful online social network requires social know-how as well as technical expertise. Interactions include those that take place face-to-face, via telephone, online, and even via things we send each other in the postal mail.

Thoughtfully planned and knowledgeably implemented online social networks can enable an organization to:

Create an early warning system.
Make sure knowledge gets to people who can act on it in time.
Connect people and build relationships across boundaries of geography
or discipline.
Provide an ongoing context for knowledge exchange that can be far
more effective than memoranda.
Attune everyone in the organization to each other's needs – more
people will know who knows who knows what, and will know it faster.
Multiply intellectual capital by the power of social capital, reducing
social friction and encouraging social cohesion.
Create an ongoing, shared social space for people who are geographically
dispersed.
Amplify innovation – when groups get turned on by what they can
do online, they go beyond problem-solving and start inventing together.
Create a community memory for group deliberation and brainstorming
that stimulates the capture of ideas and facilitates finding information
when it is needed.
Improve the way individuals think collectively – moving from knowledge-sharing
to collective knowing.
Turn training into a continuous process, not divorced from normal
business processes.
Attract and retain the best employees by providing access to social
capital that is only available within the organization.

Bonus link, Collaborating using social software.

Tags:

connecting

gated social networks

relationships

extending the enterprise

social productivity

Social Media:

Thinking too much

jim wilde — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 13:05:45 +0000

Three of the biggest challenges we face implementing social networking software and online communities in companies are getting people to contribute - work together - collaborate.

Here are a couple of ideas to solve the problem.

So you'd like to... know if you qualify as NewAge++ - A guide by Christopher Locke, author-in-progress, Mystic Bourgeoisie.

I'd like to ask you to consider a category I've lately been calling NewAge++. It's hard to boil down to a nice brief dictionary definition (I'm working on it), but you'll recognize yourself as a bona fide member of the class if you can relate positively to the following qualifiers.

You're Not New Age.

You're Spiritual But Not Religious,

Your Goal is to Integrate Body, Mind and Spirit,

You Think Self-Esteem is Healthy Narcissism,

You've Read Everything You Can Get Your Hands On by Elaine Pagels,

You're Heavy Into Quantum Physics,

You've Personally Met Jung's Archetypes,

You Forgave And Forgot,

You're in the Now Now,

Your Friends Are All White.

Thanks Dave Weinberger for the tip.

From the NY Times, Op-Ed Contributor

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

By TIMOTHY D. WILSON

Published: December 29, 2005

IT'S navel gazing time again, that stretch of the year when many of us turn our attention inward and think about how we can improve the way we live our lives. But as we embark on this annual ritual of introspection, we would do well to ask ourselves a simple question: Does it really do any good?

What can we do to improve ourselves and feel happier? Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle's observation that "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves.

Social psychologist Daniel Batson and colleagues at the University of Kansas found that participants who were given an opportunity to do a favor for another person ended up viewing themselves as kind, considerate people - unless, that is, they were asked to reflect on why they had done the favor. People in that group tended in the end to not view themselves as being especially kind.

The trick is to go out of our way to be kind to others without thinking too much about why we're doing it. As a bonus, our kindnesses will make us happier.

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Social Media:

enterprise blogging systems

Services Science

jim wilde — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:48:41 +0000

Here's an article, "A Techie, Absolutely, and More" about new areas of research in computer science called services science.

... research is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages. ... in a hot niche called computer-supported cooperative work, which studies the ways people use technology to communicate and collaborate in work groups and social networks.

We, as in Advancing Insights, don't have a real budget for R&D. However, we have a rich source for new ideas and collaboration. We use the open source communities that we are involved as a model to learn cooperative strategies. What we've learned from the open-source movement and the blogosphere is that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. We pass it on one
person, small business or big business at a time.

"You've got to constantly keep learning, I've got to constantly upgrade my skills. That's what gives you that edge."

What about you?

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