The Time is Ripe for Collaborative Innovation (Yes, Now)
by Joe McKendrick
We all know the drill by now: in economic downturns, companies first cut costs, as part of a batten-down-the-hatches mentality. But what’s next once the blood is wiped up? This is a rare opportunity for companies to marshal its networks of employees and partners to reinvent the business. And with today’s generation of collaborative social networking technologies, the opportunities for collaboration have never been greater.
In a new report in Knowledge@Wharton, Paul J.H. Schoemaker, research director for UPenn Wharton School’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation, suggests that, for some companies, the economic crisis can actually provide an innovation platform:
“The crisis has multiple impacts. Loss of revenue and profit will at first instill a cost cutting mentality, which is not good for innovation. But if the patient is bleeding you need to stop that first. Then, however, a phase starts where leaders ask which parts of their business model are weak (and perhaps unsustainable) and that, in turn, can lead to restructuring and reinvention.”
How does a company foster radical innovation? Schoemaker’s associate, George Day recommends an “Open Innovation” approach, which is also known as “crowdsourcing.” In essence, partners collaborate to solve business problems. The article cites Waltham, Mass.-based InnoCentive, which matches corporate “seekers” who have science, engineering and business problems with amateur “solvers” worldwide. The “solvers” then compete — for bragging rights and often token rewards — to provide the best answers to the corporate problems.
With the rise and ubiquity of enterprise 2.0 approaches — from wikis to blogging to sites such as Twitter — makes such collaboration possible, at minimal to no cost.
