Collaboration is an essential element of organisational innovation. When a team of people come together to devise and develop ideas, they can potentially be much more innovative than any individual member of the team can be on his own. This brings its own challenges. How does a company distill a multitude of raw ideas into value-creating innovations? Who is going to sift through all the ideas, and based on what criteria? What will be the evaluation process that separates the great thinking from the merely good?
Organisations should have a “toolbox” of tools and techniques for facilitating the life cycle of creativity to innovation. It is more than obvious that the toolbox has to be based on the principle of collaboration. Furthermore, it must support ways to connect communities not only of employees but also of customers, partners and others “outside the firewall” so they can tap into both internal and external knowledge and use that knowledge to accelerate innovation.

Fresh opportunities

The new collaboration technologies open up new innovation opportunities. As collaboration evolves, it becomes more fluid, moving from private conversations to public conversations—from the telephone, e-mail and instant messaging, for example, to shared bookmarks, wikis and blogs.
Information sharing of this type is already happening in popular consumer-oriented social networking Websites and online services for sharing photos and videos. In the old way, content is owned and protected. In the new way, content is developed through participation. In the old way, directories of people provide static contact information. In the new way, dynamic profiles reflect what people do, with whom and how well they do it.
Indeed, more and more companies are beginning to see collaboration technologies as “killer apps” they can harness to transform their companies and ultimately, to power innovation.

New ways of working

Way back, we collaborated through face-to-face meetings, office memos, mail and informal conversations at the proverbial water cooler. Over the years, as the pace of business quickened and companies became more dispersed, other technologies like fax, email, imaging, workflow, conference calls, videoconferencing were introduced to support communication across a geographically distributed workforce. But in each case, the technology simply “electronified” a well understood, existing communication channel. In other words, the goal was to replicate the effects of collocation and face-to-face interaction.
To understand where collaboration technologies are headed, consider a very different framework that characterises collaboration in terms of two new attributes:
Reach: to identify and effectively collaborate with the right people wherever they are
Awareness: to maintain continuity of information flow with one’s collaborators

New collaboration tools

Over the past few years, several new collaboration tools have emerged that are designed specifically to support innovation.
Wikipedia, which has content created entirely by volunteers and is now the ninth most-visited site on the Internet, exemplifies one type of expanded reach: the ability of an individual anywhere in the world to collaboratively create content with tens, sometimes hundreds, of others. A wiki Website operates on a principle of collaborative trust, rather than central control—any user can edit site content, including other users’ contributions. In one documented case at a large investment bank, wikis have reportedly reduced overall e-mail traffic by 75 percent and made meetings much more efficient.
Flickr, YouTube and dotSUB exhibit another type of reach. They provide the ability to take content created by a stranger and add value to it through tagging in the case of Flickr and YouTube, and through language translation in the case of dotSUB.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) illustrates how individuals can maintain awareness of new developments in their areas of interest: They subscribe to specific topics, blogs, podcasts or newsfeeds. As new material in their areas of interest is published, they are proactively forwarded to them. RSS is a syndication format that aggregates updates from blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, team sites, and news/ information Websites.
Twitter represents another particularly interesting technique for supporting awareness.  Subscribers continually “twitter,” contributing short messages (known as “microblogs”) about whatever they are doing, and the messages are then channeled to interested parties. From a corporate perspective, a globally distributed team can use the “twittering” approach to ensure that team members continually stay aware of one another’s activity, which nurtures constant communication and collaboration.
Blogging began as a tool to publish personal journals intended for general public consumption. While blogging focuses on publishing text, this phenomenon now includes new media types where podcasting distributes audio journals, while vlogging distributes video journals. Businesses are now starting to use blogs both internally and externally as an important communication channel. Some companies have internal blogs about everything from water cooler talk to product development notes and business strategies. Others are using external blogs to communicate information and engage their customers in dialogue.
Innovators use social networks to collaborate with knowledgeable coworkers, and there are new tools to map the flow of information through an organisation and to locate those knowledgeable coworkers. An organisation chart usually does not reflect how knowledge actually flows through a company.
Social network analysis provides new techniques and tools that help companies understand how knowledge flows through an organisation, and thus improve upon this exchange. It provides a clear picture of the ways that far-flung employees and divisions are working together, and can help companies identify key experts in the organisation—no matter where they reside.
Social networking sites such as LinkedIn demonstrate yet another flavor i.e. expanding one’s social network in preparation for potential future collaboration. Many leading companies are using expert locator systems, to find experts on specific topics. Early systems often depended on individuals to register themselves and their experiences into an online directory. Next-generation applications will leverage social network analysis tools to extract expertise from internal communications to reduce reliance on self-registration.
Facebook and MySpace provide a range of mechanisms for increasing both reach and awareness by building and expanding social networks and staying in constant touch with what is happening within those networks.
Second Life and other virtual worlds provide a new method of communication. While virtual worlds are still in their infancy, understanding how to use them can augment traditional ways of communicating.
The combination of awareness and reach may be ideally suited for corporate innovation. Most businesses are still struggling to get basic collaboration fundamentals in place. They are also focusing on overcoming the shortcomings of first-generation technologies. In fact, several recent studies have found that a major stumbling block for innovation is poor communication across different organisational units within a company.
According to researchers like Gartner, this focus on fundamentals will continue for the next two to four years. Therefore, deploying collaboration technologies must be viewed as a journey. To get the most “bang for the buck,” businesses should deploy and upgrade their collaboration technologies based on specific strategic innovation opportunities. n
The author is Executive Vice President,
Managed Services, NIIT Technologies

Most businesses are still struggling to get basic collaboration fundamentals in place