idea management

Social Media Tools

Open Source CMS

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:

collaborative software

rich internet applications

Your job, km, and other people

jim wilde — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:38:18 +0000

Knowledge management on the job.

One of the most thoughtful bloggers, Dave Pollard, on knowledge managemt (km) and adaptive learning has an interesting post. Here's an abbreviated version but do check out his full post. FWIW Dave's blog is loaded with great stuff on KM, so don't stop with he latest post.

"Embracing Complexity in Your Job".

"But even if I were to ask the internal and external 'customers' of my client what their information and networking and related technology needs were, they wouldn't know. It's the nature of complex environments that understanding of the 'problem' and potential solutions co-emerge from the exploration, discovery and learning process."

As a services provider, we almost always assume the problems customers face are well understood. As Dave sez, "...they wouldn't know." However, as we identify one problem and demostrate a solution, other problems/solutions "co-emerge."

Dave...

"Here's the methodology I'm trying out on the new [km] project:

Identify the Customer:
Determine who the internal and external 'customers' are -- how they can
reasonably be segmented.
Research & Observe: Study the status quo to understand what is really happening, what the real
processes and workarounds are...
Converse:Have lots of iterative discussions with different customer segments to clarify your understanding of what is happening and why.
Define and Articulate the Needs & 'Problems':Some of the emergent needs and problems will be personal, and you may be able to solve many of these just by observing, conversing, and providing the individual with your ideas and the benefit of your experience.
Imagine Ways of Addressing These Needs and Problems: Now you have reached the real
starting point: Not preconceptions and solutions looking for problems, but qualified, articulated needs and problems with no obvious solutions (if the solutions were obvious, someone would have done them already).
Create a Future State Vision If Your Imagined Solutions Were Implemented:Tell a compelling story of how things could/would happen if the solutions you imagined in step 5 were implemented.
Experiment and Prototype:Start small -- your imagined solutions will never be perfect, and small-scale experiments and prototypes will allow you to refine the solution before spending all the resources on an imperfect solution.
Scale Up: Expand the pilot to all users who share the need or share and appreciate the problem."

This becomes a real problem for some of our clients, "...suppose you follow this methodology and discover (a) there are a lot of fledgling, disorganized, self-identified communities of practice and
communities of interest in (and extending beyond) the organization that need some enabling knowledge-sharing, context-building, sense-making and connectivity technology and processes to self-organize and function."

The question becomes how much access to "enabling knowledge" to give these communities, especially if they are outside of the organization?

Tags:

km2

sharing

Social Media:

IBM On Using Open Source Tools To Create Collaborative Sites

jim wilde — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 20:01:10 +0000

This is a great endorsement from IBM on using open source collaborative tools to implement collaborative sites. We've been using them all, successfully, for the last few years to create social networks within organizations. I love it! For a small, niche consulting firm, Advancing Insights, IBM's endorsement validates what we've known and what we've been telling clients all along. "...the tools are powerful, they scale, and work better than vendor products costing tens of thousands of dollars".

Of course, there is a lot more to developing collaborative sites or community driven ones than slapping together software.

From IBM, "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site.

...for complicated sites that require more than just the standard methods of interaction and update, Web site development is still not turnkey. Many customizations are often necessary for each application within an organization.

This collection of articles from members of the IBM Internet Technology Group shows you how to use open source tools as a basis and provides a methodology and set of enhancements to simplify the process of Web site development.

...the team describes a fictitious organization that requires a customized Web site that includes, among other things, document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, and schedule session descriptions. They illustrate the creation of this Web site using the following open source tools:

Drupal - An open source content management system
MySQL - An open source database store
PHP - A Web-based language for supporting dynamic content with PHPMyAdmin and SQLBrowse
Apache - An open source Web server
Eclipse - An open source development environment
CVS - A source code management system that tracks changes in your code

They provide step-by-step guidelines to the installation and use of the development tool suite described above.
These guidelines include:

Building your development environment
Getting started with Drupal
Observing the interaction of Drupal with other software tools (such as MySQL, Ajax, and PHP)
Building custom Drupal modules
Deploying and tuning your installation"

Email or call us, 973.433.4007, to find out more about specific collaborative tools and social network implementations, training, and education.

Tags:

niche social networks

Social Media:

Social Media Tools

community software management

Communications Scale with Social Networks

jim wilde — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:33:29 +0000

Most social network platforms we set-up and run are for business organizations. Organizations that want to connect people, ideas and information - mashups - so they can improve decision making and performance amongst employees, customers, suppliers, etc. But some of the ideas Mr. Young writes about, scaling self-expression, reach of distribution, and decentralizing the ecosystem apply to what we enable inside businesses.

"Social Networks are the NewMedia", posted by Robert Young.

"It’s crucial to understand that social networks are architected to help scale self-expression to new heights, both in terms of the extent of self-expression as well as the reach of distribution (e.g. number of “friends” and the effects of the whole six degrees of separation thing). A simple example… a person on MySpace can have thousands upon thousands of friends. This was not possible before the Internet, and even prior online communications and community innovations like email, chat/forums, and IM didn’t truly enable this kind of scale. Moreover, a person can now express him/herself with multidimensional, multimedia depth via text, photos, audio and video… again, to a degree that was not really possible before.

To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”.

In the past century, the creation of cultural products was centered in Hollywood. Now, social networks are broadening the scope of cultural media to include “identity production” (a very appropriate term coined by danah boyd), all the while decentralizing the ecosystem out to the edges. For traditional media companies that are seeking to enter this space (e.g. MTV, Martha Stewart, etc.), it’s critical to follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression."

Tags:

Social Media:

Global Process Networks - Creation Nets

jim wilde — Tue, 09 May 2006 19:24:30 +0000

"Creation Nets", by John Hagel. Mr. Hagel adds a lot of context and clarity to some of the ideas, creating global process networks that harness open innovation, that I've been trying to get across to managers about social networking software. I now see my weaknesses have been "...institutional mechanisms required, ...leaving executives with the impression that there is nothing that can be done to shape or focus efforts in this arena."

"Creation Nets: Harnessing the Potential of Open innovation" by John Hagel and John Seely Brown, published by McKinsey. There is also a working paper here.

"Most executives are by now familiar with open innovation: the idea that companies, by looking outside their own boundaries, can gain better access to ideas, knowledge, and technology than they would have if they relied solely on their
own resources.
Despite the attractions of open innovation and its successes in areas such as open-source software development few companies believe that they know the best way of creating value with the open model of innovation.
Companies must go to the peripheries of today's commercial and scientific endeavors, where hundreds and even thousands of collaborators from diverse institutional settings are participating in innovative "networks of creation."
Managers can use the principles and mechanisms of "creation nets" to profit from open innovation and to
create more value than would be possible with the closed model of innovation."

In the article, Mr. Hagel lists three things:

"...we tackle the popular topic of open innovation. These are much more demanding forms of open innovation, but they offer much greater potential for both rapid incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation than the more limited forms of open innovation that seem to be the focus of much media and pundit attention.
...while narrowing the focus on one dimension, we broaden it on another. Serious analysts of open innovation generally tend to focus on one specific slice of open innovation. Rich discussions of open source software initiatives, for example, tend to restrict their scope to that one domain of collaboration. We found deep insights on creation nets in such diverse domains as software, consumer electronics hardware, motorcycles, apparel, astronomy and big wave surfing. Few,
if any of these analyses betrayed any awareness of, much less interest in, similar initiatives in other domains. We identify the patterns that are emerging across diverse domains in terms of how to organize creation nets.
We focus specifically on the institutional mechanisms
required to catalyze and focus innovation initiatives within these creation nets. Unfortunately, much of the coverage of open innovation tends to emphasize self-organizing and emergent behavior, leaving executives with the impression that there is nothing that can be done to shape or focus efforts in this arena."

[...Achieve Greater Performance...]

What we've learned from the blogosphere and the open-source community is that people (employees, customers, suppliers, partners, et al) want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit.

[...An Online Global Process Ecosystem...]

Our solutions provide a comprehensive online ecosystem, tightly integrated set of publishing, communication, and networking features and online commerce, support and enable the Net like never before. Users can engage, create, and share their content online (publicly or privately) in a multitude of ways to achieve greater performance.

Tags:

open api's

innovation

orchestrating resources

Social Media:

corporate social networks

Open Source CMS

Social networking for the enterprise

jim wilde — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 06:31:18 +0000

I've gathered together a few posts about enterprise social networking software applications.

"Social networking makes a play for the enterprise,

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe - ZDNET

"Social networking has clearly hit the big time and is demonstrating both the widespread interest, and the possibilities, of online social communities where people come together to exchange information, develop interpersonal relationships, and build long-term social networks.

This is certainly part of the promise of Web 2.0; a two-way Web powered by people and the information they bring to the table (this latter piece is something I like to call BYOC, or bring-your-own-content.)

However, a very real problem is that many of these things are often an actual distractionfrom the work that people are supposed to be conducting in the workplace; the very last thing that enterprises want these days is a MySpace-style time waster that disrupts business.

And that's where corporate version of social networks will have to tread a careful line. For example, Visible Path doesn't allow the creation of home pages or user profiles and instead builds networks out of existing business artifacts, like e-mails and other information sources. In this way, social networks are constructed out of the very fabric of the business instead of things that might take away from it, like a blog, chat room, or interest group."

Learn about our solutions, or read our blog or, check out this enterprise 2.0 demo of a social networking application.

Dion, "But an important challenge that social networking is that minimizing the personal aspects of corporate social networks will also end up limiting their usefulness. Good social networks provide ways for people to create just the sort of information to create useful affinities or ways to find the people you're interested in networking with.This is something I call the social surface area (see visualization below) but I think the potential for this in the enterprise are clearly still there, once initial concerns are overcome. Thus, the social media companies that find good ways to increase a user's social surface area without disrupting the business itself will tend to be most successful."

"MySpace for the Office," By Steve Rosenbush, Business Week

"Make no mistake: Young people love to socialize on the Web. Tens of millions of teens and young adults use sites like News Corp.'s MySpace or Facebook to trade messages on home pages loaded with blogs, photos, and music."

"Web 2.0 meets the enterprise", By Martin LaMonica Staff Writer, CNET News.com

"New ideas in consumer technology are rapidly creeping into the design and marketing of software aimed at corporations. For example, Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and AJAX are starting to show their potential behind corporate firewalls, analysts said."

Read more about social network software in the enterprise here.

Tags:

social media tools

mashups

social web applications

social productivity

social information management

Social Media:

community software management

"The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate"

jim wilde — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:33:21 +0000

These 12 ideas on innovatation are a must read for business development managers.

"The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate" from MIT Sloan by Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz.

"...many companies have a mistakenly narrow view of it. They might see innovation as synonymous with new product development or traditional research and development. But such myopia can lead to the systematic erosion of competitive advantage. As a result, companies in a given industry can come to resemble one another over time. In actuality, business innovation is far broader in scope than product or technological innovation. In fact, a company can innovate along any of 12 different dimensions with respect to its:

offerings,
platform,
solutions,
customers,
customer experience,
value capture,
processes,
organization,
supply chain,
presence,
networking, and
brand.

Sounds like good advice, pick one! Here are some ideas, focused on using web 2.0 technologies, social networking applications and community software solutions to implement them.

Tags:

innovation platform

open source

mashups

social web applications

xml

rich internet applications

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

strategy

P&G connect and develop

Social Media:

collaborative software

Open Source Leadership as an Organizational Management Style

jim wilde — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 14:18:49 +0000

Open source, like the blogosphere, is a grassroots (bottom up) movement. Try not to let the grassroots lull you into believing that it is about one or two people with an idea or cause. Today's grassroots ideas on the net become viral in days, scaling in volunteers (Seth, will you help us) to what would make any organization or marketeer cry for mercy or celebrate in the streets. But, that's not happening in most business organizations. Too bad. Business managers and team members could learn a great deal from consumer IT (social software applications).

I've gathered together ideas from OSCON (2005 Open Source Conference), Joi Ito, and others that might offer answers and possible starting points to my question (will you help us.)

Open source leadership from Joi Ito reports on the what he learned at OSCON.

Open source projects have their share of politics and petty problems and clearly leaders of other types of organization do and should exhibit these sorts of leadership traits. However, I definitely saw something special in these open source leaders which reminded me of the leaders that Dee Hock described. They had strong ethics, were humble, were extremely sensitive of the needs of their community and lead more through coordination and management of processes than through exercise of authority. This was in stark contract to some of the conversations I have had at various CEO forums where people talked about "human resources" as if they were cogs and seemed to feel that the CEO had some divine right to more money and more power. Again, I would add that there are a great number of exceptions in both groups, but generally speaking, the conversations with the open source leaders made me feel like I was seeing the future of organizations compared to my experience with CEOs of normal for-profit companies.

I think that the Mozilla Foundation [Ideascape is built on the same software architecture as the Mozilla net community] and the success of open source is a test and will be an example of a new kind of organizational management style which I believe will have lessons applicable to all kinds of organizations. (Note: DBA tag.) Enlightened leaders in other areas are also developing methods that involve treating their staff, customers and other stakeholders as a communities, but this still appears to be the exception, not the norm.

If you're interested in learning and applying open source community ideas in your organization, here are a few more links.

Coordination Theory in a Flat World covers Dr. Malone's work on coordination theory, Includes a podcast.

Why Can't Business Learn From Open Source And Blogging? Excellent essay by Paul Garham.

Building Vibrant Human Networks While Business Blogging from Harvard Business School

What are we doing besides banging the open source drum to business organizations?

We're taking the idea to the people, one person at a time or in groups: housewives, small biz owners, students, lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, seniors, truck drivers, cabbies, and your customers. Oh yeah, your smartest employess too. We're removing the barriers to entry.

"The Conversation Era"

We're teaching them how to get a voice in the blogosphere and how to use and navigate around the net using all the coolest open source tools. We have offices all over the city and in NJ. In fact, any place there's a wireless hotspot, Libraries, Starbucks, Central Park, etc. is an office where we can teach. Look for us on the streets in NYC or send an email and say hello!

Tags:

user generated content

Social Media:

Social Media Tools

Open Source CMS

New Technorati Beta

jim wilde — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:21:19 +0000

New Technorati Public Beta - Go bang on it! This is good news for our Ideascape users since they'll now be able to find/discover ideas faster and easier - connect the dots to get their work done. Here's some key updates:

* improved user experience,
* expanded tag functionality. it brings in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
* it now has more powerful advanced search features.
* they've added more personalization. current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
* you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. view all of your favorite searches on one page. you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!

Thank you to the developers at Technorati!

Social Media:

social information management

Learn, Change or Die

jim wilde — Mon, 02 May 2005 10:45:55 +0000

What's killing us: smoking, drinking, diet, stress and lack of exercise has not changed for decades.

What's killing us: smoking, drinking, diet, stress and lack of exercise has not changed for decades. From Fast Company, the May cover story is "Change or Die." As you can tell by the title, it is about changing behavior, whether it is for health reasons or business. John Kotter, a Harvard Business School Professor says that even in business " The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people."MYTH: CRISIS IS A POWERFUL IMPETUS FOR CHANGEREALITY: Ninety percent of patients who've had coronary bypasses don't maintain changes to the unhealthy lifestyles that worsen their severe heart disease and greatly threaten their lives.MYTH: CHANGE IS MOTIVATED BY FEARREALITY: It's too easy for people to go into denial of the bad things that might happen to them. Compelling, positive visions of the future are a much stronger inspiration for change.MYTH: THE FACTS WILL SET US FREEREALITY: Our thinking is guided by narratives, not facts. When a fact doesn't fit our conceptual "frames" - the metaphors we use to make sense of the world - we reject it. Also, change is inspired best by emotional appeals rather than factual statements.MYTH: SMALL, GRADUAL CHANGES ARE ALWAYS EASIER TO MAKE AND SUSTAINREALITY: Radical, sweeping changes are often easier because they quickly yield benefits.MYTH: WE CAN'T CHANGE BECAUSE OUR BRAINS BECOME "HARDWIRED" EARLY IN LIFEREALITY: Our brains have extraordinary plasticity,. meaning that we can continue learning complex new things throughout our lives assuming we remain truly active and engaged.Kotter has hit on a crucial insight. "Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings," he says. "This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."So, all the facts and figures in the world will not do much good in changing behavior. Maybe we should all take a page or two out of the playbook from Alcoholic's Anonymous "AA" or any twelve step program to gain enlightenment and awareness of our own souls. Of course, the alternative is to pop another prozac, go shopping, have a drink, go back to bed, or be marginal for a life time.All of the stories, metaphors, and feelings I have are invented in my head. They are the compass that guides me every day through life's ups and downs. A few of the simple ideas I've learned along the way are: identify with someone's feelings "feel their pain" instead of comparing; don't take life too seriously; look at the big picture - zoom out; try to learn something new every day; don't take anyone or anything for granted; enroll yourself to help others get what they want; and pay attention.What's interesting about all this talk of change, enlightenment, and learning is the cooperation and understanding that we all need from other people in order to move forward. Sure it helps to have a trusted partner, mentor, or sponsor to help guide us and identify those blind spots. My thinking is that the more connections I make with other people, the more I can learn about myself and everything else. This next link is about the Renaissance Man in all of us.Whither the Renaissance Man? from Technology Review is an article about, "Our current age of information has rightly been called a second renaissance. But what ignites a renaissance? It has to do with bringing together ideas and cultures in fresh ways and with unprecedented intensity." I have plenty to learn! In fact, Ideascape, the tool I developed was created with those ideas in mind - bringing together ideas and cultures from diverse sources to create, innovate and help people and businesses move forward.Kathy on Headrush writes about the "Difference between Japan and US". "Beauty and attention to design detail... everywhere I turned during my two week stay (Tokyo and Kyoto), I saw it. Every--and I mean every Japanese restaurant (including the fast-food sushi joints) had an architectural bent. A sense of style. An aesthetic sensibility you just don't see throughout the US!"She goes on to tell about her experience visiting the Arts section of a local bookstore ..."I had to fight my way in while Japanese of all ages were browsing through books on everything from architecture to zen gardens to pop culture graphics to photography to illustration and... (not anime, which got its OWN section)."How do you change behavior? What are you want to learning today?

Tags:

Social Media:

Idea Management Across the Organization Made Easy!

jim wilde — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:28:11 +0000

Common characteristics in an idea management system. A good one to start with - use an open source cms.

Every business development manager or chief innovation office needs to be asking this question: How do you coordinate activities and cultivate people to get more and better ideas to improve your business? While every organization should design its Idea Management processes according to its own needs, certain characteristics are common to all idea management systems. Open source CMS Idea Management System.

Ideas, big and small ones, are encouraged and welcomed.
Submitting ideas is simple.
A central repository or meeting place for ideas to be cultivated and exchanged.
A vehicle to exlpore ideas from inside and outside the business.
A method to track ideas.
Evaluation of ideas is quick and effective.
Feedback is timely, constructive, and informative.
Implementation is rapid and smooth.
Ideas are reviewed for additional potential.
Ideas are shared across the organization.
People are recognized, and success is celebrated.
Idea Management system performance is measured, reviewed, and improved.

Advancing Insights makes the whole process of idea management easy with social networking software and community software solutions.

From Computeworld, "Tap the wisdom of employees -- and boost the bottom line. Collective-intelligence tools can shepherd the best and brightest ideas and turn them into huge bonanzas."

Tags:

trust among employees

Social Media:

Getting ideas

jim wilde — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

On the fly tagging is important because with many new ideas (half-bakeded ones), it is difficult to explain them. Simple tagging is not categorizing but a way to informally describe something in our own words. Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The tipping point " and "blinks" offers some anecdotes on why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings (audio file from IT conversations with Mr. Gladwell). I believe that using simple words and metaphors - tags, we can describe new meaning to our feelings about new ideas. READY...dig in to your company's subculture and harvest raw ideas... People want to participate! To find out how your people are dealing with daily challenges, start with internal blogs. The simple tagging system in Ideascape pushes the most active tags, those getting the most attention, to the top of a list. In addition, employees from other parts of the company are seeing action on a problem or challenge and may have something to contribute. On every blog entry, every word in the text that has an external tag (those from the net) have a clickable icon next to them to indicate that their are discussions on the net. The user can choose to follow these leads and join a relevent discussion to find ideas, solutions or gain greater insights. Ideascape improves the management, flow, and quality of ideas, both small and big ones across the organization. Use it to classify, cultivate, spread, and apply ideas that target specific circumstances, aggregate themes or future possibilities. In other words, to get fast, meaningful results, put your goals and the realities of the business in sync with the daily work activities of your people and customers and what they value. Listen! AIM... Challenges, Opportunities.Get qualitative ideas from multiple sources – even unconventional ones that offer diversity and independence - blended and synthesized with your own. Ideascape instantly establishes relationships with internal and external tags (those from the net) which leads to more and better ideas. Imagine having an immediate feedback to capture the company’s informal social network – the daily problems, challenges, and opportunities that your employees and customers face. From resource allocation and processes to priorities and values - your people can create innovative solutions to complex problems.FIRE! ... Execute ideas to increase efficiency, reduce waste, improve the bottom line and most of all - make people happy.What can I learn from this?

Social Media:

collaborative software