• People driving VC and KM projects are not the potential beneficiaries of the VC tools. VC and KM are categorized as “IT issues”, and the users are rarely involved in design and implementation of the collaboration tools.
• Knowledge and information are organizational currencies, and they are not given away for free. We share information when we get something in return, and knowledge can be a powerful asset in power play situations.
• Collaboration is a question of trust and loyalties, and these ties don’t often follow official organizational structures. People have contradicting loyalties as most organizations have implicit and explicit organizational structures. Also, organizational boundaries in collaboration are not that clear as people adhere to and trust individuals and groups outside of the organization.
• Collaboration is not encouraged. Few organizations have reward systems that encourage collaboration, and even fewer have a collaboration strategy.
• Effective physical collaboration is different from effective virtual collaboration. Most organizations try to translate traditional forms of collaboration, i.e. face-to-face meetings, into virtual collaboration. Thinking that a face-to-face meeting is a pinnacle of collaboration neglects to take into account the new and different opportunities that synchronous, near time, and asynchronous VC tools offer. Virtual meetings that mirror face-to-face meeting processes end up being frustrating experiences because of technical shortcomings and poor virtual process skills.
• General attitudes towards virtual collaboration are not favourable. VC is usually considered as a second-hand substitute for physical face-to-face meetings. Few people believe that they can be effective, efficient, and most of all, fun!

1. People do not resist change as a given. However, all people have concerns, purposes and circumstances that matter to them. If people feel that their issues are acknowledged and respected, they will support change.
2. Change has its boundaries and limits. Change is partly given to us, and everything is not negotiable. There will always be conditions that we need to accept and work around. Also, we have to respect that usually the entire organization will not change.
3. Problems become our friends little by little. We need to start small in the beginning of our change journey and improve the process along the way.
4. Everybody needs to become an innovator. Widen the circle of involvement as much as possible and get people to buy in. Identify or create containers where new thinking emerges and smart systems can multiply.
5. Multilevel communication about change is essential. Connect people to the content of the change and to each other by virtual and face-to-face means.

One of the main objectives of the gathering was to start a collaboration between the members of the forum who had met in the past only to present their statements, but felt that it was time to actually talk to each other. The key topics had been identitfied and heterogenous working groups were supposed to get started on the topics.

Our concern as facilitators was especially the sustainability of the event and therefore to produce a proper documentation that could be used and accessed also after the meeting. We set up a basic wiki (pbworks.com), created pages for each thematic group- one in english and one in “international”, what ended up to be in Spanish and we introduced the tool in the beginning of the conference. Each working group, sometimes 30-40, people had a person from the organizing team to support the group work and most of the time that person helped to get into the page, explained the basics and sometimes even provided the computer. However, major part of the break out spaces was self-organized, in a semi Open Space Technology format.

As its often with wikis, there is a small hurdle in the beginning, but at the end of the conference there were already over 50 active users. It shows that a wiki is a great tool enabling bottom-up documentation of semi-structured meetings.

(images: freshplaza.it)

Download the paper

There is also ample evidence that open source models have been successful in driving innovation in larger organizations. The question that I am interested in exploring is: what are the best strategies for implementing open source principles in the SME space?

Here are a few strategies that you can employ. I have also provided real world examples of most of the implementations. Admittedly the examples come from larger organizations, but there is no reason that these principles can’t be implemented in the SME space.

After all, SME’s should be more nimble, innovative and flexible in terms of changes in corporate culture etc.

Open Collaboration Strategies for SME’s

• Solve an internal problem by crowdsourcing
• Generate new product and service ideas by creating an innovation community
• Transform corporate culture by connecting your organization in order to bridge cultural, generation gaps etc.
• Co-creating products and services with your clients
• Developing collaborative research with clients and partners
• Forming a collaborative marketing association
• Forming a collaborative procurement network

Successful Open Collaboration Implementations in Large Enterprises – some examples

The following are a few examples of how large enterprises utilize the principles of open collaboration.

GoldCorp[1] – Mobilizing an external community to solve an internal problem

Goldcorp is a mining company that was faced with an underperforming mine based in the Red Lake area in Ontario, Canada. The mining industry is very traditional and hence were shocked when, GoldCorp decided to open up their data on their mines via offering $575,000 in prize money to virtual prospectors.

• Within short order over 1400 mathematicians, students, consultants and of course geologists from over 50 different countries had downloaded the data
• The contest winner, a collaboration between Fractal Graphics and Wall & Associates from Australia, no member of whom had ever even seen the mine, built a powerful 3-D rendition of the mine.
• Subsequent drilling  resulted in striking gold in four of the first five recommendations from the winners.
• In 1996 the mine produced at an annual rate of 54,000 ounces/year
• In 2001 it was producing at an annual rate of 504,000 ounces/year

Proctor and Gamble – developing a collaborative innovation framework

Proctor and Gamble is a poster child for the effective use of open collaboration strategies to dramatically improve the effectiveness of its innovation strategy.[2] P&G implemented their Connect & Develop strategy which, in essence, is a strategy to partner with other organizations to drive the organizations Research and Development process. The results have been no less than staggering.

• Five years after the company’s stock collapse in 2000, P&G has doubled its share price
• Has dramatically increased the number of partnerships, licensing agreements etc. increasing rate of successful innovations threefold.[3]
• Today, more than 35 percent of P&G’s new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from about 15 percent in 2000
• 45 percent of the initiatives in P&G’s product development portfolio have key elements that were discovered externally
• R&D productivity has increased by nearly 60 percent
• P&G’s 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
• Internal Branding: “Connect and Develop” and “50% Rule” – 50% of all new innovations to come from external partners

“You don’t need to be a $70 billion most companies to do Connect & Develop. Most companies leverage other people’s ideas and assets… Small companies can get started like we did, namely with one person having the idea and the vision…”[4]

“P&G, for example, once known as an obsessively secretive organization, has thrown open its laboratory doors and invited outside collaborators to help develop new technologies and products, and at the same time is sharing some of its own intellectual property freely.” [5]

IBM: Fostering innovation and transforming corporate culture[6]

One of the main reasons IBM introduced their social media strategy was to develop a means to better connect their 380,000 employees (50% of which are mobile) and 200,000 contractors that are spread across 2000 offices in 50 countries.

Another important reason was in order to bridge generational gaps between the older, established, members of the organization that had grown up within the established culture and the younger generation of employees who both had something to contribute to the formation of new culture as well as much to learn about IBM’s history.

Specifically, IBM has introduced a number of specific processes;

ThinkPlace: ThinkPlace is an open discussion forum where ideas can be submitted, modified and reviewed collaborative by anyone in the organization. It was launched in late 2005. Since that time it has attracted 160,000 users who have generated over 180,000 ideas. 350 ideas have been implemented giving rise to a financial impact of over $500 million!

SmallBlue: SmallBlue is a social networking tool that provides a graphic view of the degrees of separation between IBM employees on the basis of common interests.

Beehive: Beehive is an enterprise social networking site similar to Facebook. Employees report that they use Beehive to essentially humanize their workplace by getting to know employees on levels that are not visible from within the corporate environment.

Jamming: A unique and interesting strategy utilized by IBM is the process of Jamming which is supported by a proprietary technology developed within IBM. Effectively Jamming is a real time mass collaboration brainstorming session. In 2006, IBM held InnovationJam, an internal brainstorming session that engaged 150,000 people from 104 countries and 67 different companies.

On the basis of this, ten new IBM businesses were launched with an aggregate seed investment of $100 million

Lego – empowering a user community to co-create products[7]

Lego has developed a complete social media/consumer engagement strategy that includes a number of different touchpoints; a fan club, a social network, online movies, online games, and message boards. They are also working on a massively multiplayer game.

What is most interesting is that they have opened up their software design process to roughly 120,000 designers who can design their own products. This serves the purpose of engaging closely with those that most care about the brand.

Intel – developing a Collaborative Research Framework[8]

Intel, the world’s leading manufacturer of microprocessing chips, operates in a highly dynamic and technically challenging arena. In order to drive competitiveness Intel needs to be on the forefront of the discovery of new technical solutions of various sorts. The nature of the microprocessor industry makes it possible (using Moore’s Law) to identify many of the technical hurdles that the company will face in the future. Hence Intel, throughout its history, has had a very well defined roadmap driven research process.

This, however, is strategically inadequate because it fails to identify the following:

1. New technologies and products that might lead to new business lines and the altering of corporate strategy.
2. Disruptive innovation that might threaten the existing product roadmap.

In order to address this strategic constraint, Intel has made a commitment to developing and driving exploratory research processes.[9] The four pillars of this strategy are:

• Providing collaborative research grants
• Developing collaborative research facilities in close proximity to universities
• Providing corporate venture capital
• Driving specific corporate research projects

I’ll talk more about collaborative marketing associations and procurement networks in a subsequent post.

[2] Huston, Larry and Sakkab, Nabil, Proctor and Gamble, Reproduced with permission from “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 84, No. 3, March 2006

[3] Gabor, Andrea, The Promise (and perils) of Open Collaboration, Strategy and Business, August 2009, p. 3

[4] Huston, Larry; Sakkab, Nabil, Implementing Open Innovation , Research Technology Management (Conducted Interview), 2207 Industrial Research Institute, March – April 2007, p. 1

[5] Gabor, Andrea, The Promise (and perils) of Open Collaboration, Strategy and Business, August 2009, p. 2

[6] Majchrzak, Cherbakov and Ives, Harnessing the Power of Crowds With Corporate Social Networking: How IBM does it, MIS Quarterly Executive, Volume 8, No.2, June 2009, University of Min

[7] Egol, Moeller and Vollmer, The Promise of Private Label Media, Strategy and Business, Published: May 26, 2009

[8] Tennenhouse, David, Intel’s Open Collaborative Model of Industry-University Research, Research Technology Management, Jul/Aug2004, Vol. 47 Issue 4, p19-26Added

[9] See Appendix for further details

The theme of this year’s conference was about Courageous Organizations.  It had participants wondering, “What does it mean to be a courageous organization? How does our courage show up in organizations?” Peter Senge, author of  The Fifth Discipline and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning reminded us in his keynote that change begins with individuals, rather than  a disembodied project or group . . . out there somewhere.  He also reminded us that what allows the life of any group or organization to continue can be found in what we choose conserve.

This got me thinking about the tremendous changes being brought about by new virtual media and its potential for change.  Most of the conference participants are experienced leaders of change, functioning as managers or consultants.  So when discussing the issues and possibilities of virtual collaboration, it was interesting to note how many people mentioned that they felt confused and overwhelmed by the number of technology choices as well as issues such as organizational silos, information hoarding and security.  If we are take full advantage of the potential of virtual collaboration we have to learn that the way most of us conduct ourselves on video and telephone conferences falls far short of collaboration.

Conference participants discuss virtual collaboration.

In our session,  I posed the question:

If the virtual world is here to stay and fraught with possibilities and perils, What do we want to conserve? What do we want to let go of?

The responses from our conversations (below) are both insightful and full of wisdom, because virtual collaboration goes well beyond the choice of technology. It is something much more human.  It is about how we behave toward one another and  how we engage to create and complete work that matters most to us and our organizations.

What do we want to conserve:

• An understanding that personal mastery is ongoing
• The richness of spontaneous leadership
• Taking time to develop quality relationships and communication
• The awareness to ask others, “what do you need?”
• Personal accountability and measures of progress
• Trust and courage to extend ourselves to others

What do we want to let go of:

• The belief that face-to-face is the only way to truly collaborate well
• That change is not the ‘new normal’
• The belief that “knowledge is power”
• That every person is the same and that there is just one right way to collaborate

What is true is that we can all learn how to collaborate more effectively in the real world and the virtual world.  It is also worth noting that the challenges in each domain are not the same.  The lesson is to be open to the opportunity to create something new that can transcend  the limits of physical space, time and even some forms of human interaction. Virtual collaboration won’t replace human interaction but it does call for different ways and methods of interacting that will continue to evolve.  The question becomes, what are you going to do about it?

Twitter notes for the entire Senge keynote are posted on Twitter:  hashtag #st09senge.

Let us think about people how build trust. A common way is to be influenced by the first visual expression we have, plus the additional information we get from our other senses (tone of voice, smell, etc.). Some of us are good at that and some of us are regularly fooled by their hormones or their presumptions (I am definitely one of those). That is what my colleague Jouke Kruijer who has done some research on the issue calls affect-based trust.

A second possibility to build trust is to analyse the information we have about this person plus his behavior and come to a more rational verdict (coginition-based trust).

And a third possibility is to observe team members’ behavior while working on joint projects. This is what Jouke calls swift trust. Are they reliable? Do they walk their talk? Do they take resposibility? How do they deal with conflicts, problems and shortfalls? All these questions can be answered in virtual teams as in face-to-face teams.

What brought us together was the Real Time Virtual Collaboration workshop on May 9, 2009. This was a workshop in which we were able to test and develop our collaboration patters. After the project was concluded successfully we knew that we wanted to continue as a team. We found new projects, and step by step we strengthened our relationships. We tested hundred of collaboration tools until we found the right mix (I will write a blog post about these next week, as a continuation of this post). We did not define any rules of collaboration but we worked on trust base.

Finally, it was time to meet and it was as if we had known for a long time…

Terms like “virtual”, “social media”, and “collaboration” have many meanings. In this post I will use the terms “virtual collaboration” and “social media collaboration” interchangeably to mean working with others to produce or achieve something together using the capacities provided by computer technology on the internet. I mean anything from a proprietary tools for online meetings to wikis, blogs, chats, online communities, and so on.  In this light, social media collaboration is a groundbreaking opportunity for organizations because it allows people to gather, find and share expertise, knowledge and information in ways that are relatively fast, easy and cheap.

In the analysis phase of our first benchmark study on social media collaboration, I am struck by both the pace and scale of change swirling around this topic. There has been a lot of excitement about examples of social media collaboration from the development of information resources such as Wikipedia and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive, to the mass adoption of social media business tools like Twitter and Linkedin.  Curiously, there seems also a scarcity of systematic approaches for developing virtual collaboration strategies.

Many organizations are diving in with piecemeal solutions and feeling their way along. Such patterns if frenzied adoption are familiar to me after spending over 20 years in the computer industry. What is different, however, is that the impacts of piece-meal strategies are now amplified by other organizational pressures. Much of the strain is the result of the relentless consolidation of functions in a quest to build efficiency. At a recent planning session, an executive of a highly successful global marketing company disclosed, “We have squeezed about every ounce of productivity from our employees that we can. There are fewer of them and we are asking them to much more. The incoming generation of workers are more demanding and less tolerant and we are losing the wisdom that comes from experience.”Adding further confusion to the social media front is the dizzying array of new tools. It seems every few weeks there is another to choose from.

Understandably, only a handful of organizations have made the effort to develop robust enterrpise-wide virtual collaboration strategies. After all, it is human nature to approach any new paradigm in terms we already understand. Many executives can’t imagine a new world of internet-enabled collaboration that isn’t about marketing.  Others see it as the implementation of a new software standard. Collaboration is not the same thing as gathering customer data, even if that data is found through the use of social media.

Collaboration means to work WITH others to produce or achieve something. Regardless of the technological platform you choose, collaboration begins to occur only when new meaningful work is approached by people with a shared vision for what the work they intend to accomplish. Social media collaboration is neither an information technology project, a people problem nor a business issue. Virtual collaboration occurs at the intersection of all three. That is not to say there is only way to virtually collaborate, in fact, there are many ways. Yet to build and sustain a virtual collaboration strategy, most organizations will need to learn how to nurture a fit between collaborators AND the context in which work if accomplish  with social media tools.

Marten Hansen of the University of California and INSEAD, France, builds a case for “disciplined collaboration” rather than open or closed collaboration. In his new book*, Hansen suggests three leverage points to collaboration, virtual and otherwise.

1. Unify people
2. Cultivate T-shaped Management (a balance between individual performance and shared contribution)
3. Build nimble networks

Because technology, people, and business issues are evolving and inter-dependent parts of any organization, they are better understood as living entities than as static objects. Nurturing the fit will continue to be more of an art than a science. Ask any musician, artist, athlete or visionary leader. One never masters an art, one just gets better through life-long practice.

Practicing an art implies that social media collaboration feeds on the the same things that healthy organizations thrive on. Organizations will have to continue to become better at differentiating between what they know and when they need help from outsiders, balancing long-term opportunities with concrete goals, objectives and actions, and sharing accountability for learning and adapting to changes that are the inevitable by-product of being a a living system.

*Hansen, M0rten T. Collaboration: how leaders avoid the traps, create unity and reap big results. Harvard Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4221-1550-2

Radical Inclusion – Open Virtual Collaboration

Last August we embarked on research of organizations to better understand what is really happening with the adoption, and more importantly, use and human engagement in web 2.0/virtual  collaboration.

From our analysis thus far, one thing is clear – at  the root of any collaboration is a collection of human beings with boundless and unique ways of interacting.  In order to take advantage of the power of web 2.0 technologies and beyond to solve our most intractable issues, we all have much to learn.  Virtual collaboration is not about technology alone; it merely opens new doors.  How we use it and engage with each other will determine what we accomplish and the race is on!

Whatever your interest in web 2.0 – enterprise 2.0 – virtual collaboration, our research shows that knowledge of collaborating complemented by social media is nascent at best.  Those involved range from advocates to experimenters to dabblers, lurkers and the blissfully unaware.  More and more companies are providing tools, services, advice, yet we are all operating from fairly limited exposure to user needs.  Rather ironic considering we’re all talking about wisdom of crowds and collective intelligence.

Both users and service providers need to continually adapt to the ways in which people are interacting with technology and to the ever-increasing pace of change in the technology, economy and a range off global societies.

No one has all the answers.  Much of the expert research I’ve looked at is designed to promote a particular need for virtual interaction or focuses narrowly on questions of technology – all necessary conversations.

This learning group is hosted as the first and only open and transparent space we know of to share learning: our experiences, questions, concerns and a place to discover new practices.  Anyone who is interested learning experience is invited.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2350136&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

You might also think of joining us at the Berlin Change Days (Nov. 9-10, 2009) in the Berlin Hub. This is a conference for practitioners, leaders and managers who would like to discuss aspects of change processes. CHANGE nowadays is a ‘buzz’ word, especially since President Obama has made it the focus of his campaign. Corperations, non-profit organizations, and administrations have all become aware that the complexity of change processes cannot be handled by single actors or small groups. This complexity exceeds both their decision as well as implementation capability of traditional management structures. There is a worldwide demand for internal and external support of change processes. The development of new tools and methods continues.

The programme of the 1st Berlin Change Days responds to the needs of practitioners who are involved in everyday change processes of organisations and social institutions, offering guidance for better results but also a longer term perspective for the development of human resources as well as internal and external structures. In two parallel streams, the programme entails events in English and German language. If you are passionate about change in business, government and society, the Berlin Change Days are the most important event this year – and hopefully in the future!

Radical Inclusion will host a workshop during the Berlin Change Days: New approaches to virtual meetings.

Purpose of research
The intent of the research is to learn what sorts of business issues are being addressed,  what approaches are working well and about approaches to adoption and use.

Interview participants will be invited to a briefing of results and receive a summary report of research findings.  Individual and organizational identities will not be shared.

Interview candidates are sought from  organizations who are:

1. are actively involved in online collaborations that go beyond web-meetings and the use of social media for marketing purposes.
2. are involved in decisions to use social media in order to find information, expertise and resources related to business or organizational issues outside traditional work group boundaries to
3. from established non-profits, foundations, universities, corporations, research facilities, government agencies of 50 or more employees.

Interviews are conducted by phone appointment  and will last approx 20-30 minutes.

We are developing the study primarily or internal education purposes.  Researchers have been doing this sort of work for more than 15 years, therefore, the  quality of analysis and summary will be professional and high value.

We are self-funded and not sponsored by vendors or any other business.

If you are interested in participation in this project, please email us hello [at] radical-inclusion [dot] com.  Tell us a little bit about who you represent and how you’re involved.

Thank you.