Closing the innovation gap
Technology isn't a cure-all for getting employees to talk to each other. In fact, it can be the enemy.
By Scott Raskin, CEO, Mindjet
Raskin: Employees need to get leave their cubicles and desks, literally or virtually. Photo: Mindjet
How do you harness the creativity of your workforce? In this age of Twitter, Facebook and other so-called Web 2.0 tools, technology seems like an obvious way to get employees to collaborate. Ditto your suppliers, customers and other interested parties.
But collaboration, high-tech or otherwise, isn’t so easy to manage. Renowned business strategist Gary Hamel is one of many business leaders to comment on the challenges of sparking workforce creativity. In his book Leading the Revolution, Hamel dedicates a chapter to Design Rules for Innovation. He notes that a company’s intent on generating sustained wealth must create “an open market for ideas…a dynamic internal market for ideas within the organization.”
In essence, Hamel calls for a return of the collaboration that once stood as the cornerstone of innovation in Western culture – a culture that predated Tweets and status updates.
But what are we talking about when we describe this sought-after collaboration “renaissance”?
The roots of the collaborative work environment can be traced back to the 1970s and 80s. Developed countries were facing the transition from primarily manufacturing-based economies – where discussions and planning revolved around improving manufacturing cycle times, increasing production and the ability to manufacture at a lower cost – to primarily service-oriented economies focused on bringing new products to market.
The creativity differentiator
The ability to be creative became a differentiator for so many of the businesses we know today. And companies started placing a heavy emphasis on business environments that helped valued employees collaborate, innovate and solve real business problems.
As a result, the physical workplace changed. Since most companies would typically operate out of one office building, the initial move was to open office space, and create low cubicles to facilitate conversations over walls. Collaboration rooms were next, followed by the creation of the Huddleboard by Steelcase (SCS): movable whiteboards that could then be taken with the team wherever they went. Ideas and information captured during collaborative sessions (brainstorms) would then “live” throughout the duration of the project.
As wonderfully explained and detailed by Thomas Friedman in his book The World is Flat, the 90s brought forth the age of globalization; manufacturing and other key industries moved to more cost-efficient regions of the globe like India and China.
People no longer needed to be in a single or central location. This, coupled with a workforce that had slowly transitioned to one that was more knowledge- and skill-oriented than its manufacturing-focused predecessors, forced organizations to seek efficiencies, and identify potential technologies to help address these issues. Teleconferencing, video conferencing and the birth and evolution of e-mail all ensued. Soon thereafter, technologies like web conferencing followed.
But in allowing for this distributed workforce – across various geographies and in disparate offices – technologies also pushed the workforce back into their offices and cubicles.
Who is building the virtual "Huddleboard"?
The movement of ideas and information became an e-mail exchange versus a brainstorming session in a conference room
This is a huge opportunity for the next wave of collaboration technologies: tools that can become the virtual equivalent of the Huddleboard or whiteboard perhaps can ignite creativity and collaboration among employees. It helps that web 2.0 is by its very nature collaborative: a service such as Wikipedia, for example, benefits from the contributions of multiple users.
But unless the tools allow for real-time, interactive and – crucially, informal and candid exchanges – they run the risk of keeping people (and their ideas) behind their desks.
Raskin is CEO of Mindjet, a San Francisco-based company that develops tools to help companies collect, organize and share information.
I agree with the author and Andrew that it goes much beyond technology. We recently launched a system/tool internally that gives all employees a place to share their ideas as well as vote, comment and get involved with the other ideas.
The general concept is not brand new and this is just part of a larger cultural change we are working on that includes business process, visible executive-level sponsorship and lots of work making the system easy to use.
I still see more hurdles to overcome and new potential roadblocks pop up now that it's launched, but I think we've set a good foundation to evolve into something that will create measureable value for both users and the company.
We've entered our approach in the Forrester Groundswell Awards
http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards2009/detail.php?id=164
Brightidea creates on-demand idea and innovation management tools that help companies foster collaboration collaborative and innovative corporate enviroments. Companies such as BT, Cisco, HP and others use it internally to manage innovation across multiple departments and business lines.
Collaboration is not about technology. Its about mind set, team goals, leadership and partipation by the leadership in the collaboration technology.
Over the years I have seen effective use of collaboration tools: Compuserve, Dec's All-in-One, Lotus Notes within succesful multi-office and national teams.
The worst implementation I was part of involved a small consultancy where the leaders introduced the collaboration system but fell back to using emails because it was more convenient for them. I wasted many hours designing and delivering a training programme to enable people to use the technology.
Mindjet's collaboration tool Connect provides the opportunity for simultaneous exchange and growth of ideas in the mind map framework. The challenge is getting people to get it!
The problem with most online "threaded" conversations is that they merely "unravel" – we need convergent collaboration instead. Technology can now support the re-invention of the suggestion box, and offer us all the equitable representation (shared governance) and equitable remuneration (based on actual market values) that comes from our founding Bill of Rights(US), and deserves to be offered globally(them). Given the right online approach, we could all "ASK4" mutual needs and then share mutual benefits across our "U-Netted Nations". Does anyone else think it is time to bypass the bastions of reluctance, and empower "We the People..", everywhere?