knowledge management

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.

Tags:

cannibalize

tolerance for risk

Social Media:

social information management

collaborative software

Internal social software for business

jim wilde — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:36:45 +0000

We use Drupal to make social software apps to run on intranets.

In the workplace, leveraging information in new ways improves decision making, customer service, and how people get work done. Business managers, team leaders, and customer facing employees will be amazed with the power and flexibility of social networking software.

So, what are your thoughts about using internal blogs or social networking software within a company to capture and tag both, explicit and tacit knowledge? What about wikis, forums, groups, micro-content, folksonomy (tagging), chat, knowledge management 2.0, etc.? Would you prefer to work for a company using these tools for communications, making connections, collaboration? How do you think they would affect the bottom line; your daily work routine; employee morale?

You know, business runs, by default, on e-mail. It's always there, and it just works, so we end up using it for everything - as a telephone, as a filing cabinet and as a conference room. But the trouble with e-mail is that it happily gobbles up our ideas, crucial documents and business acumen and doesn't give them back.

At the end of the day, you need to solve a workplace problem. So, stop reading about social applications and collaboration tools. Unleash your imagination and start experimenting with them. The real value and power of social software can only be appreciated with hands-on experience. Consider this, a short-term, pilot project to discover and evaluate solutions based on results. We're easy to work with and provide application audit trails as well as productivity metrics.

Productivity gains that impact business - Forward thinkers and project teams will quickly gain experience (days) with online communities, social networking applications, and new information flows as they apply to how people learn, collaborate and innovate. The results are a rich learning environment (ever lasting) that supports better decision making and work flow. Priceless!

Leveraging resources to create custom solutions. We take a hybrid approach between open source, closed source, functionality, risk and support to deliver simple or advanced, custom solutions. Ones that are stable with superior performance and maximum uptime.

A small investment with big returns and short cycles. We listen to your problems and offer solutions. From practical ones to crazy ones, we'll help you unlock and apply the benefits of social software and Web 2.0 ideas. Call us now at 973.433.4007.

Leveraging information in new ways...

You might start thinking differently [use a central data base - internal social networking app] about feeding e-mail your precious thoughts. Hey, there's gold in them there folders that could provide precious answers to a lot of other employees.

Combining Social Technologies with new ways of doing business...

We primarily work with business development managers and creative leaders.They are starting to believe that these new social productivity tools combined with Social Information Management ideas are reshaping the way companies need to operate in order to succeed in a nonlinear, borderless world. Trends like this one are changing customer expectations, buying behaviors and the pace at which companies must make decisions and even shift directions.

Give us a call, 973.433.4007, to learn how internal social networking applications and community software solutions can help your business become more productive, connected, and engaging.

Tags:

internal blogs

internal social software

km2

employees

productivity

email abuse

social media tools

Social Media:

enterprise blogging systems

idea management

Social Media Tools

Business Development Ideas

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

gated social networks

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:

gated social networks

open api's

innovation

orchestrating resources

Social Media:

corporate social networks

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:

Business Development Ideas

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:

collaborative software

Business Development Ideas

RETAIL REVOLUTION - PUTTING YOUR CUSTOMERS TO WORK WITH SOCIAL NETWORKS

jim wilde — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:21:27 +0000

With web 2.0 tools and social software applications, retailers and marketers are using customer feedback to improver products and services.

Retail Revolution - Fortune by Oliver Ryan.

"EVER SINCE the first book review was written on Amazon.com in 1995, online shoppers have relied on one another for product intelligence. Whether it's a flat-screen TV or a Crock-Pot, someone somewhere has reviewed it, often in frightening detail. But despite Amazon's success, few other retailers have embraced reviews on their sites."

"Every year it came up, and every year we nixed it," says PETCO's vice president of e-commerce, John Lazarchic. The problem? "We had no knowledge of what the return on investment would be." Retailers of all stripes have been scared off by the cost of managing an online review community, not to mention the prospect of negative reviews and unforeseen legal liabilities.

"Harnessing the seemingly inexhaustible spirit of volunteerism that has powered MySpace and Wikipedia, the budding industry has the promise to affect inventory management, marketing, and consumer service."

Last year, I wrote about Amazon and their social network system here.

"One of the startups charges as much as $8,000 a month to handle everything from designing the review area on a retail's site to moderating discussions and analyzing user comments.

CompUSA, reports that reviews which show up on search engine result pages drew 20,000 additional visitors to its site in December. What's more, those visitors were 50% more likely to buy. PETCO has found another benefit: using customer product reviews in its advertising copy. Increased traffic is nice, but the big opportunity for retailers is to mine this new customer feedback."

A focus group can cost $5,000 to $10,000 for 20 people, but a social network system to support thousands of customers can cost under 10k in many cases.

Tags:

Social Media:

community software management

Trends in Business?

jim wilde — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 15:44:44 +0000

Dave Pollard - How to save the world has posted, The Ten Most Important Trends in Business based on a survey conduted by Strategy+Business. I was not able to find the original survey on S+B. Most of Daves ideas are pretty well echoed throughout the blogosphere. Too bad the people that need to know about these trends, ideas, and technologies are too caught in the quarterly numbers.

Open-Source Business - ... it's about open partnerships with those outside and inside the organization who can help the business provide better products and services to customers.

Disruptive Innovation - Clay Christensen's research shows the total futility of trying to create barriers to protect your turf from competitors, some of whom don't yet even exist.

Complexity - Dave Snowden is pioneering work that shows that existing business strategies and processes are designed to deal with 'complicated systems', and that a radically new approach is needed to deal with 'complex systems'.

Corporate Reform -. The corporation itself has become dysfunctional, even pathological, and corporate laws and charters need a complete overhaul.

Innovation Incubation - Innovation is risky, and incumbents dislike risk, which is why entrepreneurs (with some notable exceptions) have always been at the vanguard of innovation.

Social Networking and Personal Productivity Improvement - It's all about the people, stupid. Forget the hierarchy and the cult of leadership. Forget about 'organizational knowledge' and 'organizational learning'.

Wisdom of Crowds - The customer is always right, but today that's usually only realized in hindsight.

Channel Customization - One size does not fit all. The future price of any manufactured commodity (and renewable natural commodities as well) trends to zero.

Customer Relationship Management - Most businesses still think their purpose is to sell products or services to a reluctant market.

Execution - The modern corporation is like a refinery for small, incremental, insubstantial changes. For substantial changes it is a minefield. Most ideas, including the best and the boldest, get blown up quickly.

Want more? Read any of my older posts and follow the links. My hunch is that most businesses with follow the... The Pathology of Business Bullshit instead of using... Candor In The Workplace. What do you think?

Tags:

organizational structures

firm theroy

Social Media:

Social Media Tools

You can't manage knowledge?

jim wilde — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 13:38:24 +0000

Knowledge Management by Euan Semple from his blog The Obvious sez, "You can increase the likelihood of connections, you can increase the chances that such connections will result in one person helping another and you can help create a culture in which helping each other is a good thing but you sure as hell can't manage knowledge." Bang! Euan shoud know since he walks the talk at the BBC.

For the avid KM fans, here is how wikipedia describes knowledge management.

Dave Weinberger, "Knowledge is literally a matter of conversation. It's disagreement with people who stretch you. Knowledge is the continuing conversation, not the result of it". I agree with Dave and Euan, read my post on Employee plots to Corporate Scenarios to learn more about connecting conversations via social network applications and about people working together using community applications to accomplish complex tasks.

Bonus: Boiled to death!

Tags:

orchestrating resources

Social Media:

It's Alive!

jim wilde — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 14:16:08 +0000

The Power Of Us, BusinessWeek, "Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business. ...A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power."

I suppose I must be talking to the wrong execs in NJ and NY since most of them have this crazy idea that their business is the exception and will not be affected by any of this "social software media technology crap." Maybe the problem is that they are incapable of the empathy that is often found in the blogsosphere. I don't know. The barriers to entry are low, and the tools are elegant and simple. Hey, if you're one of those managers, drop me a line about Ideascape.

"For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical." This has got to scare the shit out of any business that is used to total control.

"Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous."

Tags:

Social Media:

Who says Blogs have to be about Egos?

Wed, 04 May 2005 15:26:53 +0000

In reference to Seth's discussion on ego, my partner Jim neglected to expand on our idea for using blogs as a communications/idea generating tool WITHIN companies. I think the Blogs that Seth's referring to in his "ego" post are the ones that currently reside in the "Blogosphere" - the ones full of pontificating PR blow-hards, techy geeks and whining self analysing personal blogs among others. What we see for Ideascape is bringing the blog INTERNAL, to the corporate atmosphere...creating internal mini-blogospheres, where anyone can and will blog with a different purpose: to record their knowledge, to offer their ideas, to add to the knowledge base of the company. Yes, even in this atmosphere, there will be those who can't help but editorialize; but we're hoping it will also appeal to the writing-shy technical experts who will jot down their experiences and knowledge without flowery messages "just the facts, ma'am" type of posts, and to the "peons" who have cost-saving fantastic ideas but because they aren't listened to, the ideas die away as they simply do their jobs and go home for fulfillment that they could be getting on the job.

Tags:

blogs

community

business

internal communications

Social Media: