open innovation

From McKinsey, "Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla's Mitchell Baker." This article offers three great tips for any size organization wanting to tap external ideas. Ms. Baker also talks about having a participatory culture.

I find myself on both sides of this idea when I'm listening to clients about their business/products/services/processes requirements and then trying to explain to them the business advantages of social network software. What happens on both sides is we assume too much and expect others to at least have an understanding of the basics. Hell, most people are overwhelmed. Anyway, here's an interesting article form The NY Times about innovation and "the curse of knowledge".

From the NY Times...

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. "

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.

"Government Blogging" by Shel Israel on red couch.

"The simple answer is to be closer with their constituents.

Forbes has several articles on the many changes that are disrupting business models. I posted on this subject last year, Why Do Good Companies Fail?

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.

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