Social Glass

In a previous post I discussed how competition fuels innovation, and that in order for this to happen innovation must self manifest. Enter the Knowledge Market. Wikipedia defines a market as:

..a mechanism which allows people to trade, normally governed by the theory of supply and demand…

Markets operate in a “…space, actual or metaphorical”, called the marketplace. A simple example of this are farmer’s markets where farmers showcase their crops and livestock on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. Potential consumers locate goods they’re interested in by wandering through the marketplace and purchase what appeals to them. The price of goods fluctuates throughout the day based on supply and demand principles - if a farmer is having a tough time selling his tomatoes he might start offering special discounts (and these special discounts can be heard by everyone - you’d know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been to one of these things) to increase demand.

The Enterprise Knowledge Market
In the same sense Enterprise 2.0 is a virtual marketplace for knowledge, where knowledge workers, through the Discovery process, “wander through” corporate knowledge assets and consume what interests them. Knowledge workers also compete with each other as producers, not on price, but on the usefulness of their information. Usefulness relates to recognition, and recognition is good for a knowledge worker’s career.

The value of a knowledge asset, then, doesn’t have a $ figure associated with it, but is instead related to the demand for said asset, which can be determined by:

• the number of people who subscribe to it
• the number of incoming links to it

Google.com does a great job of placing useful content toward the top of it search results page, and the enterprise version of Google does the same. But the enterprise knowledge marketplace, the Discovery process, needs to be more than just Search.

With the stock market I can receive constant updates on the value of stocks and follow the supply/demand fluctuation in real-time (represented by price variance). Inside the enterprise, if I had services similar to that which Technorati provides, I could better understand the supply/demand for corporate knowledge assets. Technorati ranks the value of blogs based on incoming links, but inside the enterprise this needs to be extended to include subscriber counts (feedburner) and other knowledge assets (not just blogs). I could then, in real-time, understand the value the organization places on content items by reviewing subscriber and incoming link counts, which would fluctuate in much the same way stock prices do. This platform, combined with enterprise search, augments the Discovery process and increases the effectiveness of my Enterprise Knowledge Market.

And it’s having an effective Enterprise Knowledge Market that’s key to driving participation and recognition.  If knowledge worker contributions can be discovered and valued, knowledge workers have a huge, self-motivated, incentive to contribute, and that makes the enterprise better off as a whole.