Maturing Innovation
April 20th, 2007by Jeremy Thomas
In the Enterprise 2.0 space we spend a lot of time discussing meta-innovation, that is, innovation about how to innovate. Paula Thornton over at the FASTForward blog makes a good point that innovation is a human ability and Enterprise 2.0 is simply an innovation enabler - “Technologies can be deemed ‘innovative’, but do not innovate.” And while the thoughts and concepts around how to create an innovation factory ecosystem are superb, I haven’t seen much development around what should be done once innovative ideas are recognized. How do corporations actually discover and harness innovation from the Enterprise 2.0 cloud?
Enter the Innovation Maturity Model.
Enterprise 2.0 is largely about Discovery and Collaboration - the process of finding content and people, and working together to drive to an outcome. This process encourages idea sharing and development from the ground up, as the capacity for 1000’s of knowledge workers to innovate is far greater than that of a few top executives (Rod Boothby).
There needs to be a community of people who are able to find and recognize innovative ideas from the Enterprise 2.0 cloud. These ideas need to be aggregated and refined so that policy makers can understand them and their business relevance. Once understood, these policy makers then decide if the innovative ideas are mature enough to become part of corporate policy or even corporate strategy.
This process lends itself to the notion of the “moderator” - a body that controls the flow if ideas from the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem toward corporate adoption. ECM (Enterprise Content Management) has traditionally played in the “mature content” realm, and I think one could make a strong case that Enterprise 2.0 and traditional ECM are complimentary when it comes to maturing innovation. Policies and strategies need to be guarded and locked down and cannot rise and fall with the changing tides of collective enterprise intelligence (thought it was time to get a little poetic).
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May 2nd, 2007 at 1:32 am
Jeremy, Thanks for thinking through this a bit more. You’ve touched on a number of topics that have very deep implications (few of which anyone is really paying attention to).
One that has gotten some attention (but it may be waning) is Design Thinking: Innovation is not possible without the fundamentals of design thinking.
“Claudia Kotchka…spends most of her time in the halls, listening, learning, talking. To open up communication, Kotchka advocates spending more on common spaces for designers than on private workplaces. The message: P&G wants employees to hang out and connect. In innovative companies, the new R&D lab is the break room.” Business Week has commited significant page space to the concepts of Innovation and Design: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/.
But there are other critical dimensions of ‘thinking’ that need to be applied, as well. There are fundamentals of economics (read Wikinomics), fundamentals of Complexity science (the balance between order and chaos…I’ve a long reading list here), and then even physically changing the way we work (see summary of one of Microsoft’s endeavors, “The 5Ps of Design & Development” http://totalexperience.corante.com/archives/2007/03/02/the_5_ps_of_design_development.php).
There are so many dimensions of change needed, the first thing we need to do is make sure that we can talk to each other (start by assessing the accessibility and the depth of corporate directories — that’s the first litmus test).
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Hey Paula - thanks for the links! I agree that there are a lot of similarities between economics, chaos theories and Enterprise 2.0. If I were to get really nerdy here I’d even use Astronomy as a metaphor for showing how chaos (the propulsion of chemical compounds into the Universe after the big bang) can be converted into order (galaxies, solar systems, life?).
You’re correct in saying the first thing we need to do is enable communication and collaboration, and I think this is why most E2.0 evangelists focus on this point. But, given my experience pitching this stuff, I think corporations need a holistic picture for how E2.0 can give them “tangible” assets that can be used to make them more efficient, profitable and influence corporate direction.