Outside Innovation

Enterprise 2.0: Take the Plunge!

By Matthew Lees, VP and Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group


While the term “Enterprise 2.0” looks like what the rebuilt Star Trek space ship might be called, it’s also the name of this week’s just-concluded conference in Boston on the sociological, operational, and technological changes in the way people are working and companies are conducting business.

Although the focus of our work at the Patricia Seybold Group is on engaging and collaborating with customers, partners, and others outside your organizational walls, most of the sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference were geared toward internal collaboration and productivity…how “social tools” can be used to help employees do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, make information and knowledge more available and findable, and increase innovation.

Most Compelling Application—Socialtext’s new wiki-based, collaborative spreadsheet, SocialCalc, developed with Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the blast-from-the-past spreadsheet VisiCalc (http://www.socialtext.com). The SocialCalc spreadsheet engine is also a project on the One Laptop per Child Program.

Most Astute Observation on How People Use Social Tools—Paraphrased from David Marshak, Program Director at IBM / Lotus (and a former PSGroup colleague): “Most instant messages in the workplace are like this: We want to say ‘Can you please help me with this problem, which is important to me, but probably not important to you, although I’m hoping you’ll stop doing what you’re doing to do this for me?’ But we don’t want to type all that, so we just abbreviate it by writing ‘Hi.’”

Patterns from Innovators

I had the great privilege of participating in an Innovation panel at Sensors Expo in Chicago on June 11, 2008. The panel of experts included Audley Brown, director of advanced propulsion system controls for GM’s PowerTrain group, Dr. Nat Sims from Mass General, who runs SimsLab for anesthesia and critical care, Jon Frederickson from Innocentive who recruits “seeker” organizations to engage in open innovation, and myself. The panel was assembled and beautifully facilitated by John Hanks, vice president, data acquisition and control, of National Instruments.

The panel was fine. But we had the most fun swapping stories and views over dinner the night before. The “formal” discussion in front of the audience didn’t quite capture all the richness of our behind the scenes conversations. I wish there were a way to capture the real deal—the real animated conversations among practitioners—not try to re-create a proxy of it on stage.

Here are some of the themes I noticed in our on- and off-stage dialogs:

- Cross-Industry Idea Transfer is at the Heart of many Innovations

- Platform + Ecosystem + Business Model + Content = Success

- Challenge-based Approach Is Popular and Successful

- Framing the Question Correctly

Cross-Industry Idea Transfer Is at the Heart of Many Innovations

Nat Sims told the story of how he came up with the idea for an intelligent, automated approach to dispensing anesthesia (and, later, other medicines) by using a programmable controller with algorithms based on a database of locally-physician-created, hospital approved, and up-to-date application instructions.

CNN’s I-Report Initiative Promotes User-Generated Content

During our Visionaries meeting, which was held in Atlanta in mid-April, we had the opportunity to tour CNN and to meet with Tyson Wheatley, one of the founding editors of CNN’s I-Report initiative. This is the section of CNN’s Web site (www.ireport.com) where anyone over the age of 13 can upload their own photos, videos, audios, and/or text submissions as long as that content complies with CNN’s terms of use. It’s a great site to follow for those of you who are interested in learning how to leverage user-generated content.

 Tyson told our small band of Visionaries that the team responsible for creating, piloting, and shepherding i-report.com into being has been “about 1.5 people” until very recently. Now the group has grown to about 7 employees. They’ve had strong support from CNN management from the outset.

The idea behind i-report.com is to take advantage of the power of “citizen journalism.” The people who are closest to breaking news are the ones best equipped to provide photos, videos, and first-hand accounts. CNN has long been the recipient of unsolicited videos and eyewitness reports from far-flung “journalists.” In the past, an editor would always vet the submitted material by talking to the person directly and asking questions to ensure the authenticity of the footage as well as to ensure its legality. Some of the issues that CNN cares about when vetting a submission are the following: the submission can’t contain objectionable or copyrighted material; CNN also need to be careful about where the footage was taken. Was it on public or private property? Who took the video? Only the actual eyewitness is permitted to submit material. Often, Tyson explained, in the case of really breaking news, that screening conversation takes place within minutes of receiving the material. But as the volume of user submissions has increased, it was becoming harder to manage and screen them in a timely fashion.

By creating a section of the CNN.com Web site that is devoted to collecting and featuring customers’ submissions, the CNN editors discovered it was both a good way to make it much easier for people to submit appropriate content and to make it easier for CNN to screen that content to ensure that it meets their standards.