Social Glass

1. Visibility = recognition
2. Knowledge workers compete for recognition.
3. Competition fuels participation.
4. Participation –> more quality information assets –> increased probability of innovative ideas surfacing.
5. Innovation = increased economic viability = happy enterprise.

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.

History shows us that competing societies catalyze innovation, and that’s certainly one of the principal points made in the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He points out that the rapid advancement in naval warfare technologies in Europe, for example, was a result of wars between England and France in the 1700s and 1800s. If France built a bigger cannon England must do so also or risk defeat. Competition forces societies to recognize and embrace innovation. According to wikipedia, in the 15th century, for example, the Ottoman Empire was the first to effectively adopt gunpowder and managed to conquer the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans due to its technologically superior weaponry. Coincidentally the empire was eventually overthrown due to its inability to embrace new military innovations as those in power were threatened by change and thus chose not to change at all.

Jared Diamond eventually won the Pulitzer Price for his book and his advice has been sought by corporations on how they might foster innovation. On this topic (according to strategy-business.com), Jared’s position is:

“There are obvious differences in innovation and productivity among companies (compare Microsoft with IBM), industrial belts (Silicon Valley in California versus Route 128 outside Boston), countries (Japan versus Russia), and sectors within the same country (Japan’s electronics industry versus its food industry).” The distinctions in innovation and productivity, he says, relate to “differences in the flow of ideas, centralized control, and operation of competition — just as in the contrasting histories of China and Europe.”

Microsoft brought Jared in to help them foster helpful competition. Microsoft is now organized into small, competing groups in an attempt to harness the innovation that is expected as output.

In order for innovation to fuel competition inside an organization innovation must be apparent. During the Cold War nuclear missile tests were used to showcase technological advancement on both sides. But (assuming we’re not talking about Lockhead Martin), how to organizations manifest innovation internally?

Enterprise 2.0.

When intellectual property is discoverable across the enterprise a state of comprehensive competition arises. This means knowledge workers must be able to easily document and publish their knowledge, and other knowledge workers must be able to find it.

To enhance a previous position I’ve held on Discovery and Collaboration, then, Discovery leads to Competition which leads to Innovation.  Enterprise 2.0 is key to enabling organizations to realize the benefits internal competition brings to the table.