Business Cases, Collaboration Platforms and Innovation.
A recent very good Cisco post on the next generation collaborative enterprise mentioned - amongst a great deal of interesting thoughts on collaboration platforms and how they will change the way companies work - that ‘Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions’. A comment on the post asked then asked the perfectly reasonable question : “how does the framework ensure these priorities are in line with the business goals?”
We getting similar thoughts from our customers, as we begin to show Innovate, the Claromentis 6.0 Innovation application. This relates to a previous post here where we were discussing the implications of collaboration platforms directly conflicting with the discipline of more controlled communication channels.
It seems to me that one possible way these different business structures can coexist is based on the difference between fostering creativity and enabling innovation. Or as Claromentis has described it the ‘shout, collaborate, execute’ journey.
Creativity and Innovation are two very different things, and sometimes it seems to me that confusion in discussing the impact of Corporate Social Networking results from not being clear about which of these is actually being discussed.
In the well known quote from Theodore Levitt “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
In essence creativity uses divergent thinking to create ideas that then feed into innovation. Innovation is the implementation of those ideas – putting them into action.
Collaboration platforms can really help to foster creativity by putting like minded people from different perspectives or locations in touch and so break down silos both internally and externally.
However when it comes to taking those creative ideas and executing to produce innovation – in a corporate space this will in general terms require expenditure. Depending on the maturity of the company and the scale of the projects – these will generally need business cases – and these always set out the rational for where the project will generate value within a more traditional and documented vision of the business objectives.
So it seems to me that the next generation enterprise will be able to impose some control not by constraining the way collaboration platforms are used to innovate – but by managing the process that selects which ideas these platforms generate are turned into real projects.
The ideas and decisions made within fast moving collaboration platforms can be prioritised and set within more formal and longer term management goals – and indeed over time help to change these goals - by the continued discipline of business cases being required in practical terms to actually execute on an idea – to move from collaboration to the very much harder task of innovation.
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collaboration, corporate social networking, innovation
