Erik van Bekkum: Innovation

Collaborative Working Environments for Business and Industry

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 13:58:55 GMT

Did you miss the first edition of Collaborative Working Environments for Business and Industry, also dubbed CWE, earlier this year? Although the contribution of virtual communities and communities of practice was only a part of the larger conversation about the collaborative working environment, it's still interesting to check out the next edition which will take place in Sweden, on June 14th, 2007. The call for papers is still open (check their website). The conference has a very strong ICT focus (as an enabler, has to be said) because it derives from the FP programme of the EU.

Breakthrough innovation in business models with communities of practice (/interest) was discussed by Laso Ballosteros. It's both an opportunity and a threat, he claims, in his presentation. The role of these communities is going to be quite different in 15 years time than it is now. Also, some reference to Alistair Rogers in his keynote: "Communities learn together. They build skills, knowledge and ‘lore’. The big issue is how to teach individuals the value of teams and how to be effective on and with teams. Even harder is how to build those communities over distance. We have the ‘myth’ that we can build tools that can fix this. It’s not going to be easy!"

The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 20:49:33 GMT

Genrich S. Altshuller is te founding father of TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. I am stuying the facilitation of knowledge networks and communities of practice in the application of methods like TRIZ. One of the better reference pages about TRIZ can be found here; an interesting part for that facilitation is the part where is described how Altshuller noted that the source of the solution required broader knowledge and more solutions to consider before an ideal one could be found.

Table 1. Levels of Inventiveness.
Level	Degree of inventiveness	% of solutions	Source of knowledge	Approximate # of solutions to consider
1	Apparent solution	32%	Personal knowledge	10
2	Minor improvement	45%	Knowledge within company	100
3	Major improvement	18%	Knowledge within the industry	1000
4	New concept	4%	Knowledge outside the industry	100,000
5	Discovery	1%	All that is knowable	1,000,000

What Altshuller tabulated was that over 90% of the problems engineers faced had been solved somewhere before. If engineers could follow a path to an ideal solution, starting with the lowest level, their personal knowledge and experience, and working their way to higher levels, most of the solutions could be derived from knowledge already present in the company, industry, or in another industry.

Power struggle in radical innovation communities

Wed, 18 May 2005 19:31:26 GMT

In her work about the construction of communities of practice for innovation [Management Learning.2002; 33: 477-496], Jacky Swan from the Warwick Business School puts down in a couple of paragraphs why communities are places where incremental innovation can foster yet radical innovation cannot (because of the boundaries). In 2003 I wrote about the community ecosystem and the need for boundary spanners which describes a similar thesis. It's been nearly fifteen years since Brown and Duguid linked the idea of communities of practice and organizational learning and innovation.

These characteristics of spontaneity and freedom from organizational constraints lead authors to link communities of practice positively to learning, knowledge flows and innovation. Evidence in support focuses on the ways innovation emerges incrementally from local adaptations of work practices within communities, in response to new problems.

Communities need to be emergent and adaptive to membership and domain changes.

However, it has also been noted that, whilst communities of practice may encourage the flow of knowledge and innovation within communities, they may limit the knowledge flows across communities and, therefore, can place constraints on innovation at the wider organizational level In particular, radical innovations often occur at the interstices across established groups and work activities – they are radical precisely because they disrupt or fundamentally alter current work practices. Established communities of practice may, then, pose problems for the development of radical innovations that cross such communities.

So, encouraging communities of practice than cross organizational boundaries such as business units or the corporation itself, can augment the individual and organizational capabilities to radical innovation. There's a problem though. The knowledge that each of the groups (organizations) in the emergent community have is tied to social relationships of the people that have created and maintained it. Radical innovation and subsequently creation of new knowledge requires new social relationships between the groups (organizations). The 'negotiation of meaning and identity' (like in Wenger) in the emergent community is highly conflictual, especially with the lack of institutionalized roles. A power struggle between the groups that form the emergent community is consequence.

The development of the power struggle is dependent on the commonalities in ethics, values and beliefs that the groups (organizations have). Yet each of them have two important organizational tools to support them:

Strategy (the determination of the long term goals, including resources to execute a course of action). Those who can shape or give meaning to the strategy (for instance, innovation strategy) will have more power in the community;

Structure (the framework and design of the formal organization that supports the groups, including lines of communication). It provides the groups with two important resources: information and authority. Groups that can control either will have more power. Changes in the (adaptive) community can highly influence the distribution of this power though.

Innovation communities of practice at P&G

Thu, 27 May 2004 07:25:05 GMT

Coming back from Madrid was reading this month's edition of Fortune Magazine and found myself surprised to see that there is a major article in it devoted to innovation and communities of practice. In the section "innovation special: P&G teaching and old dog new tricks" there is a five-page article on how diversity and cross-BU collaboration using communities (and they are actually called communities of practice in the article) has turned around the innovation process and 'made P&G into a brand-builder and model growth company again'. This emergence is remarkable because P&G is known for it's notoriously rule-bound culture.

They describe in brief how their 7,500 R&D scientists acoss nine countries work in communities and how it has been delivering results using innovation reviews. P&G CEO Lafley says that one of the things is that people (in the CoPs) are credited both for giving as well as taking, underlining the P&G uncommon viewpoint for the dominant role of the social dimension.

Dave Pollard on business innovation and networks

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 21:57:15 GMT

What does all this mean for today's company looking to jump-start its innovation programs and processes, and today's individual looking to participate in making his or her own, or his or her employer's, enterprise more innovative?

Dave Pollard has continued his great work on networked organizations and innovation paper.

Hierarchy and Autocracy are the Enemies of Innovation: There is a strong creative tension between individuals and the communities they elect to or are asked to be part of, caused by divergent needs, drivers, and behaviours. Each individual and each community needs its own space. Flat, small, responsive, democratic organizations are inherently more innovative.

Innovation Needs an Urgent Problem: True innovation only occurs where there is consensus that there is an important problem to solve and a sense of urgency to solve it.

Cooperation is Replacing Competition: Competition is now dysfunctional, a vestige of earlier times of resource scarcity, and cooperation is now essential to effective innovation.

The Customer Rules: The customer is now king and needs only better decision making tools to become the sole driver of economic activity, rendering obsolete the need for marketing, branding, and other producer-driven mechanisms of influencing customer actions.

Female Organizational Style is More Innovative Than Male: As shown in the table below, organizational structures, processes and behaviours more commonly associated with businesses run by women are gaining traction in the New Economy, and that bodes well for innovation.

The Emerging New Economy Will Accelerate Innovation: Despite the current waves of globalization, corporatism and increased concentration of wealth and power, the Internet and other new technologies will inexorably break the strangle-hold of riak-averse oligopolies and unleash a new age of astonishing innovation.

What are you still reading here ??? - go and check the whole story out in his blog.

An experiment in social innovation: Pow-Wow of the Dutch Connection

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 21:31:45 GMT

Tonight was the first event of the "Dutch Connection" group that is starting to emerge from a group of people that have formally or informally met in Ecademy over the last weeks. Lead by Colby Stuart it has been both refreshing and inspiring (time well spent). Once again it becomes apparent that the potential of co-creation and social / business innovation happens at the boundaries of networks. Bringing these people together (and they are revolutionists) will spark many creative conversations and ideas.

One of the themes that was spent talking about was the value of identity in social network platforms by properly using the personal profile. A profile is much more than a banner to lure business opportunties in, it is a reflection of all the facets of your ambition and the context in which that has been creation. Ambition says something about what your personal objectives, the tools and inspiration.

A small group exercise I proposed to the group may help bring out such group identity - but the emergence of such identity can only be attained if we convey our personal one.And that this is not always about business, was reflected in the list of attributes that was co-created in the group.

It recalled what Prusak / Cohen said in "In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work" about the Xerox teams as well..

Creativity, innovators and social networks

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 22:49:17 GMT

MonkeyMagic reported on Ton Zijlstra's and Lilia's Blogwalk (sorry, circumstances lead me that I could not be there); a perception of direction, trust and creativity

Creativity In lots of ways I think Ton makes good sense. Certainly in terms of picking out those diamond signals from the noise. Ton suggests that

"Knowledge workers ... need to be exposed to as much background noise as possible, to open up as much opportunities to respond as possible."

... and it rings true. It certainly seems to be true in the creative sphere. Amateurs, for example, can and do make great leaps of intuition. (Perhaps because their filters are less restrictive, they get more signals?). Equally artists have a long and fruitful history of opening their doors of perception.

I think that the 'exposure to noise' translates back to the multi-community membership properties that creative people and innovators have; they tend to have access to many networks and know how to translate noise to signals, depending on the direction and purpose of the network. Some other starting point was on the CoP theme on KB last year (with contributions from Dr. Patricia Wolf).

Social Network Analysis (see here for more information on that) is a must when it comes to supporting the conversation with revolutionist. In the article above there are many references to that, but Rob Cross has a nice sample for this application as well (pointer by Patti).

Disruptive innovation and strategic learning

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 21:18:07 GMT

There are more and more articles available on the relationships between leadership, knowledge ecology and management and (disruptive) innovation. When we started working on the position papers that created an understanding of the crucial relationship between communities of practice and disruptive / radical innovation (see documents) there were hardly any academic or commercial papers on these topics.

Even the San Francisco Chronical published a piece on Clayton Christensen (if you still do not have 'the innovator's solution, buy it now)

Also, BN net released a new paper the other day, which has some of these elements and (again) they seem to use the action-learning cycle (they called it "learn, focus, align and execute). They say on their website about this 'strategic learning' (though they never come clear on why they put the focus on learning?) paper, which is free of charge:

How can established organizations create the capacity for ongoing adaptation? This paper provides a practical leadership process for creating an adaptive enterprise by mobilizing a dynamic cycle of four steps: learn, focus, align and execute.

Limits to innovation? Steve Jobs at Apple.

Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:12:04 GMT

But wait. What can possibly be wrong with that? After all, we worship innovation as an absolute corporate good, along with such things as teamwork and leadership. Even more than these virtues, it has come to be seen as synonymous with growth. Political economists have assigned tremendous significance to it since at least the mid-20th century. Innovation is at the heart of Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction, for example: the process of "industrial mutation" that keeps markets healthy and progressive. Management theorists embraced the notion in the intervening decades, and a stream of academic papers and books promoting innovation as the critical element of business success issued forth from the likes of Peters and Drucker, Foster and Christensen. Innovate or die, we were told. It's the core of excellence and the root of entrepreneurship. It's the attacker's advantage, the new imperative, the explosion, the dilemma and the solution. (You can play this game at home, too, with any of the 49,529 titles that come up for "innovation" on Amazon.) And yet it's hard to look at Apple without wondering if innovation is really all it's cracked up to be.

Very interesting article from the January 2004 edition of Fast Company about Steve Jobs and Innovation at Apple. My suggestion is to read the sidebar (at the end) first, then the whole article.

Sidebar: Getting Innovation Right

If Apple teaches us anything, it's that effective innovation is about more than building beautiful cool things. A few thoughts for innovating well in your own shop:

Not All Innovation Is Equal
Technical innovation will earn you lots of adoring fans (think Apple). Business-model innovation will earn you lots of money (think Dell).
Innovate for Cash, Not Cachet
If your cool new thing doesn't generate enough money to cover costs and make a profit, it isn't innovation. It's art.
Don't Hoard Your Goodies
Getting to market on time and at the right price is vital. If that means licensing your idea to an outside manufacturer or marketer, do it.
Innovation Doesn't Generate Growth. Management Does
If you covet awards for creativity, go to Hollywood. Managers get rewarded for results, which come from customers.
Attention Deficit Has No Place Here
Every innovation worth doing deserves your commitment. Don't leap from one new thing to another. If your creation doesn't appear important to you, it won't be important to anyone else.

Phase change explained in CP Square

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 20:25:56 GMT

In CPSquare there is a series of very interesting discussions and collaborative action about 'phase change in communities'. If you're not a member, this may well be one of the best reasons to join it, some great materials are coming out of the last gathering in Amsterdam during the C&T 2003 conference.

Someone pointed to the article The journey from WIIFM to WOMII (here) that touches upon the mental (innovation!) mode conveyed in the CP2 work group.

A key driver for learning in a CoP context is the development of the individual’s identify within the group

Giving large companies the capability for disruptive innovation, with communities

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 00:05:55 GMT

Clayton M. Christensen in his book "Harvard Business Review on Innovation" (2001) the author explains why it is usually not large companies with resources, capabilities and staff that initiate the disruptive innovations but rather support sustaining (incremental~) innovations.

Sustaining innovations are nearly always developed and introduced by established industry leaders. But the same companies never introduce - or cope well with - disruptive innovations. Why? Our resource-process framework holds the answer. Industry leaders are organized to develop and introduce sustaining technologies.

He goes on by telling:

Disruptive innovations occur so intermittently that no company has the routine process for handling them.

The issue is that smaller companies may lack the resources , "but that does not matter" because they have qualities that allow them to respond to emerging growth markets: their processes for R&D and market research and the fact that not all decisions need to be backed up by management, give them some unique capabilities.

Interestingly enough, larger companies can create for themselves these capabilities in various ways. Though he does not elaborate on this very much (he mentions the 'superteams'), communities of practice provide exactly the advantageous attributes that smaller companies have (the leadership and role of management, decision making by the collective). "Organizational boundaries are an impediment" Clayton says; communities of practice in their very nature cross these formal organizational boundaries and support the emergence and creation of new processes to support radical innovation in a unparalleled way.

Crossing boundaries of the formal organization, be more flexible
Allow creating of processes for radical innovation
Manage different ways of leadership and and the role of management

Fiona Lettice wrote a nice article with a more general scrope of disruptive innovation (not in relationship to communities) in the Knowledgeboard "Q&A on Disruptive Innovation: The Challenges for Managing Knowledge"

The Next Big Thing - or many Next Big Things?

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 13:26:07 GMT

In BusinessWeek (edition 17-November) there is an interesting column from Samuel Palmisano about "How the US can keep its innovation going". He says:

"Innovation is occuring within a global - not national ecosystem. It has multiple points of intersection amongst business, government and academia, and in industries ranging from biotechnology to transportation, energy, telecommunications, and information technology, and in the public sector. That is why there is not going to be a single Next Big Thing. There will be many"

Remarkable is his comment later in the column, where he asked a very valid question (but fails to answer it)

"How do we define and measure innovation in ways that capture the realities of a new century?"

- will understanding the role of global networks and innovation potential of these networks give insight..?

Globalization, innovation and KM

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:46:49 GMT

Juan Jose Goñi Zabala from Ibermatica writes in Gestion del Conocimiento (KM) about innovation and knowledge management, from the perspective of diversity and globalization. It is a very high level article - he considers all the external influences and asks himself why it is necessary but leaves out the how it can be addressed in organizations.

Serious threats and diffuse opportunities appear to us, the horizon becomes less precise and the uncertainty increases, becomes the reason why it is essential to take again the strengths of the technological and organizational capacities to reconsider the way in which knowledge can be applied to innovate.

The full text is in Spanish but you can use Google to translate it into English.

Overall Growth Via Disruptive Innovation

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 19:55:02 GMT

MIT Sloan Management Review:

Disruptive innovation in an industry always creates new markets and new net growth.

...

But the real story behind disruptive innovation is not one of destruction, but of its opposite: In every industry changed by disruption, the net effect has been total market growth.

...

Disruption creates net growth in the form of new markets and customers long before it directly encroaches on an established business. Examples from many industries, both recent and decades old, show how new entrants did not start out as competition to the established players; they were serving customers who could find nothing acceptable in the established market. Only as the newcomers moved upmarket did they create problems for the incumbent companies.

...

Disruption actually develops in three distinct phases. In the first, the innovation creates a new, noncompetitive market independent of the established business. In the second, the new market expands and slows the growth of the established business. In the third phase, the disruptive innovation, having improved greatly over time, significantly reduces the size of the old market.

...

Second, new customers must be found outside the established market. Disruptive innovations serve those who are currently nonconsuming but want to move upmarket and accomplish things they can't with available products or services. By definition, existing customers don't match that description.

Third, disruptive technology is never disruptive to the customers who buy it. Balloon angioplasty was viewed as a poor solution to heart disease by cardiac surgeons but as a breakthrough by cardiologists. Part of the key to successful disruptive innovation is finding customers who will more than welcome it, even if it delivers less than the standard in the established market.

Fourth, the new customer will make the disruptive path clear. In other words, the needs of the new customer should dictate the new business model. Products should be built according to the outcomes demanded by the new market, and the legacy costs and undervalued features associated with the established products should be abandoned.

Finally, a disruptive new business should start small and not be forced to grow quickly. Starting small enables managers to figure out what the new customers require and don't require, adjusting business models and product architectures early before huge resources are poured into the new business. It also eases pressures to make the disruption conform to the established market.

found through the [OSG Blog]

Turning your network position into a competitive (innovation) advantage

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 20:23:59 GMT

IDEO does not only understand that innovation comes from structure, practice and culture. It also realizes that the potential is in the position your have in the network, and how to use that to your benefit:

IDEO has recently recognized the full potential of its network position. By moving among so many small worlds, it has acquired more than just a lot of good objects and ideas. IDEO has also acquired links to a range of vendors, suppliers and manufacturers that are particularly innovative or easy to work with, to research scientists with deep knowledge of emerging materials, to product companies that are central to particular markets. IDEO has realized it is not just in the business of combining existing objects and ideas in novel ways, but also in the business of building communities around those recombinant innovations.

And they even go further than that:

Building on its ability to create new applications that combine emerging technologies with other objects and ideas, IDEO then uses its vast network of people and firms to build a community around those innovative new products and processes.

I came across this through George Siemens' Elearningspace but captured the concept in the full article only.

Innovation and Small Worlds: Bridging vs Merging

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 10:24:35 GMT

Innovation and Small Worlds: Bridging vs Merging

One last set of comments on Andrew Hargadons How Breakthroughs Happen: As I said before, I'm focused primarily on his idea that innovation happens when technology brokers bridge otherwise disconnected worlds. Hargadon wants firms to allow technology brokers to move within the small worlds" that already exist in most firms: There are many places within firms between project teams, between divisions, between plants where competition, politics, geography, and lack of communication have created small worlds by creating gaps in the flow of ideas and people across the organization."

So when innovation fails or isn't happening, does that mean these gaps are being mis-managed? I think so, and to understand that better I think it's important to look at the characteristics of the gaps themselves. [Corante: IdeaFlow]

Renee Hopkins is reading the "How Breakthrough happens.." book which was delivered to me by Amazon just earlier this week. As a small experiment, I will track his vision and comments on the actual book and context in which it was written - then read the book and respond to it (or blog about it).

Paradigm shift and disruptive innovation

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 23:08:34 GMT

Steve Hannaford on disruptive innovation, and the paradigm shift:

"However, having a new paradigm is not enough. "for a discontinuous innovation to be disruptive, successful exploitation is vital, which, results in significant transformation of the mainstream market and its value proposition." Disruption in the market is a big threat to established companies, who are often blindsided by the changes."

Bob McBroom on Borax' innovation forum

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:18:15 GMT

Threaded discussion software helps Borax generate new ideas globally and manage content - an article that appeared last month in the online Line56 business magazine about the work that we did on the innovation forum of Borax.

Bob McBroom says : "The international character of threaded discussions is a familiar benefit to those who use the Web for recreation, but McBroom adds another explicitly corporate benefit by way of an example. "Someone has an idea on how to use borates in, say, road building," he says. "We have a sales manager in France who has contacts at a road building institute. We can all get suggestions to him with different levels of expertise -- marketing, chemistry. We can give him advice. It's cross-functional."

Doug's vision on an investment a the new future

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 22:05:08 GMT

Doug Engelbart from the Bootstrap alliance in a one year old but very good presentation called "Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future" in which he lays out the foundation for his own, disruptive and innovative thinking.

His key point is how to build new capabilities using collective IQ. In doing so, he travels from his vision of infrastructure of capabilities to the compelling co-evolution and his well-known ABC of improvement infrastructure.

Great, great stuff.

All credits to Doug's bootstrap alliance.. until I have found the location where I got it back, you can download the slides here.

Blogs and visual innovation.

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 16:37:34 GMT

Today I have been reading an article written by Eileen Clegg about visual learning - building knowledge, innovation and collaboration. As part of the work I am doing to drive radical innovation with communities, I think that these ideas are very powerful in the creativity (or ideation) phase. She says that:

Images can be used to elicit creative ideas from a group by tapping into the source of innovation, ideas that tend to be more holistic than linear, more intuitive than rational. Creativity is enhanced when people interact with images. Seeing is personal and draws on unconscious elements. When looking at the same image, everyone has a somewhat different interpretation of what they are seeing, based on past experiences

Though her part about visual collaboration and storytelling is equally compelling, I see a huge potential in the ideation stage when an visual application is used in combination with blogs. Blogs are an excellent tool to use within a community to drive radical innovation - and if visual images of blogs can be used to enhance creativity, there's an interesting potential.

Imagine corporate use of the feedster image engine - just showing images of blogs recently created. Now if this is mixed with the taxonomy / categorization of Google images that'd be something.

Driving innovation with communities of practice

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 23:49:57 GMT

I have started to prepare for the virtual communities 2003 meeting in London next week. Some of the work we will talk about is communities of practice and innovation - and here is how I perceive that it all comes together;

Driving innovation with communities of practice - finding the right balance.

Note - the image is actually 3-D (there is a guidance text on the bottom - left more about this). If you click on it, it'll open a new window with a full-size picture (195 kB)

Differences between creativity and innovation

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 23:42:53 GMT

More On Differences Between Creativity & Innovation

Renee ... thanks for continuing this conversation. I agree ... creativity is more than idea fluency and innovation is more than project management. While some people dismiss this as "semantics," I think it's important to understand the terms and the relationship between them ... at least for those of us who are trying to advance the discipline of innovation. As we developed, reworked and reworked again the InnovationDNA over the years, we realized that creativity is a piece of innovation (using a life/human body metaphor, I think of it as the brain of innovation), critical, but only one of several critical elements -- the others being:

Challenge (what we're trying to change or accomplish -- the "pull"),
Customer Focus (we have to be creating value for someone -- the "push"),
Creativity (generating and sharing ideas is everyone's job -- "the brain")
Communication (the flow of information and ideas is the "lifeblood"),
Collaboration (innovation is only done by people working together -- the "heart"),
Completion (implementing the new ideas -- the "muscle"),
Contemplation (learning and sharing lessons leads to ever higher competency -- the "ladder"),
Culture (the playing field of innovation) includes:
- Leadership (sees the possibilities and positions the team for action -- the role model)
- People (diverse groups of radically empowered people innovate -- the source of innovation)
- Basic Values (trust and respect define and distinguish an innovation organization -- the backbone)
- Innovation Values (certain values stoke the fires that make the impossible possible -- the spark)
- Context (innovation is shaped by interactions with the world)

A recent Harvard alert stated that 70% of all business initiatives fail. That is a horrifying thought that plays out in human terms as well as bottom line terms -- lost jobs, stress, untapped or misused skills and talents, and lost opportunities to improve our organizations and the world.

I think a huge part of this high level of failure is not understanding the underlying principles of all change initiatives. Our culture is so focused on doing that we jump into projects and initiatives without understanding the ramifications of our actions. We look for "best practices" that we can replicate rather than understanding the principles and then thinking about how we can forward the principles within the unique environment of each organization. Then, six months later when we don't have the results we wanted, we brush our hands together and say, "Well, we tried innovation (or quality, or continuous improvement, or ...) and that didn't work." If we understood the principles, we would know that the problem wasn't the principle, it was the implementation and we could keep moving forward in our own way toward the ideal of the principle.

Clay Christensen talked in the same vein recently in a Harvard teleconference about the importance of sound theories. It's easy for writers in this area to study a few companies and synthesize a few practices into a "best practice" or theory. One best practice does not make a theory or a principle.

And I'm sure I've gone on too long about this. It's a bit of a hot button!

[Corante: IdeaFlow]

Connected Innovation

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 18:58:55 GMT

In a paper produced by Richard Gabriel and Ron Goldman (CGEY) about the role of how communities can be part of the innovation process in the organization, they use the open-source software model to analyze the potential benefits for corporate application:

"We believe this strategy (the open source) is indicative of a more complex view of open source, in which individuals or companies join collaborative communities in order to mutually benefit from one another’s expertise. We call this strategy “Innovation Happens Elsewhere” (IHE)."

They marked this as part of a larger discussion called 'demistyfing innovation'. About a conglomerate of different communities (or sub-communities) they turn to the basics of communities and say:

"Each community will flourish or wither depending on how well its interests are met by the community resources." and later "New ones will spring up, grow, and possibly become dormant or die. As long as there are always some thriving communities, the larger open source project can be considered alive and well. Note that death of a community does not equal failure. Consider a community that arose to develop a new standard."

In the second part of the document, they give three points to get to an organization that would emabrace the IHE (Innovation Happened Elsewhere) model:

Understand the true proprietary value and technology of the company
Be confident (and make sure) you can be swifter than the competition
Create a company culture that embraces innovation, wherever they occur

"Next, an outside company using gifts from the IHE company recognizes that these tools, technology, and prototypes can be combined with its own company’s technology to produce products at lower cost, less risk, and of great value to its customer base. Again, this is done for selfish reasons, but such decisions help expand the customer base for the IHE company. Sometimes a company or organization will think of an application or variation of the gift that will open the IHE company up to entirely unexpected markets. This is one of the most important return gifts the IHE strategy can provide. "

There is a more clear statement in another paper on why they'd assume this is the case for some organizations:

"When a given firm’s design rules become known and accepted by a number of firms, industry standards emerge. At this point, the vertically integrated firm no longer maintains extensive control over the product architecture. In an effort to compete on the bases of reliability, customization, and price, incumbents outsource to specialty firms that focus solely on the production of a particular module. This precipitates a shift in firm structure away from vertical integration toward a more horizontal model. The end result is an industry that resembles a networked cluster of specialized firms. "

and even:

Organizations have been trying to streamline and improve their development processes for decades. Portfolio analysis, stage-gate processes, options pricing models, and numerous other tools and techniques have decreased time to market and increased average returns on investments in nearly every industry. These gains are certainly attractive, and firms that are not already trying such approaches should do so. Still, these techniques primarily focus on internal, linear processes. There is a whole new horizon for what kinds of gains are possible when connectivity is leveraged. The age-old idea of letting a thousand (innovation) flowers bloom becomes a much more tenable proposition if the gardeners are working together.

The Conference Board of Canada reports that “firms that collaborate are . . . significantly more likely to introduce breakthrough (world-first) innovations.” Collaborations include inter-firm but also working relationships with universities and government labs. This represents the power of multiple members of an economic “web” of relationships working together. Firms can take advantage of connectivity to enhance innovation development in two new ways: dealing with disruptive innovations by managing networks of modules, and leveraging the power of many through distributed development.

Their papers support the earlier submitted model for innovation architecture in this weblog. The full articles can be downloaded at their center of business innovation

(ECCOP) Measures to help CPs foster radical innovation

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 17:28:41 GMT

[extract from Value Creation with Communities of Practice]

Measures to help CPs foster radical innovation

Dear friends and colleagues,

What if communities of practice could contribute not only to incremental but radical innovation? How can they be organized and supported for achieving that? If you were your company’s Director of Communities, what would be the 2 or 3 most important measures or initiatives that you would introduce to enable them?

Why are these questions important? Because radical innovation can lead to 100x or 1000x more value to business and society than what incremental innovation networks can achieve.

So, what is “radical innovation,” anyway? It is non-linear and discontinuous innovation in products, services or processes which alter some social, technical or business practice. If you want to find out more about its relationship with “communities of practice”, you may want to read our whitepaper (a .pdf file).

Your answer to the questions at the top is your entry to a free and exciting community learning experience. As some of you know, I’ve been working with Erik van Bekkum in the European Collaborative for Communities of Practice on the link between radical innovation and communities..

See the whole thread about this exciting learning expedition we have started - and comment there or email me to contribute.

Hyperdocument from Doug Engelbart

Wed, 21 May 2003 20:32:51 GMT

Yesterday I had a compelling follow up discussion with Doug Engelbart - from the Bootstrap alliance - about his hyperdocument theory and the fact that pieces information can become networks itself. The concept is very old (1950's)and has been discussed by others as well, but understanding the potential is a true eye-opener. Once the slides have been emailed around they can be posted here in the blog.

Interesting of couse is the opportunity to have information turn into contextual knowledge by seeing how information was created and in which ecosystem of considerations and other information snippets. For instance, you'd not be able to see what someone opinionates with information in a conflict situation, but also understand what construed this information that lead to the conflict. There are many more discussion items that we did not have time to, but he invited me to continue talking next week Friday in his office.

Some issues to address - what can the hyperdocument (i-file) model contribute to the changing way of driving disruptive or even radical innovation?