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Rod Boothby has some great ideas around how Enterprise 2.0 can help companies innovate.

I thought it’d be interesting to cover one basic scenario to illustrate some important points.

Point 1 - Discovery and Collaboration
Take a simple example where a bank has two departments, Consumer Loans and Commercial Loans. Both departments report to “The Head Honcho”, have one Department Lead and a few knowledge workers beneath them. A knowledge worker from the Consumer Loans department has an innovative idea. He wants to create a special loan package for customers who already have a consumer loan and are seeking a commercial loan (i.e. for their small business). To do this he’ll need to work with somebody who understands commercial loans.
The Enterprise 2.0 Discovery process allows the consumer loan knowledge worker to search for and locate (say, through an Enterprise Search tool) a commercial loan knowledge worker in the other department who has relevant knowledge and experience (as manifested by the blogs and wiki pages he’s authored, all of which are also discoverable).

So, the two knowledge workers from different departments begin collaborating and come up with a new idea for packaging loans.

Without Discovery and Collaboration it would have been difficult for consumer loans knowledge worker to find somebody in the commercial loans department with relevant insight.

Point 2 - Organisational Readiness

Which one of the Department Heads gets credit for the new idea? Do they allow the knowledge workers to pitch the idea directly to the Head Honcho cutting them out of the process?

Organisations need to be ready to embrace innovation from lower levels and from lateral departments. If the Deparment Heads feel threatened by said innovation, this ficticious bank will fail to realise the benefits of its Enterprise 2.0 system. Enterprise 2.0 is very much about changing organisational cultures to encourage, identify and seize innovation from all levels.