Size does sometimes matter

There is this persistent myth that large organizations cannot innovate, that they can be overthrown from their market position from one day to another by a little player. There is this illusion that innovation can only be accomplished by a small team in a garage. Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers started his company so; he launched his concept to sell directly to customers competitively priced computers built according to the client specifications.

The Drawbacks
It is true that large companies can suffer from a few downsides when trying to innovate. They might suffer from standard operating procedure overload and cemented routines putting them on a hard track without lateral thinking. Staff specialization is another drawback stifling creativity as the employees have narrower fields of exploration and expertise.

People in large organizations also face communication issues. On one hand they experience information compartmentalization due to the virtual silos created by administrative divisions, departments, groups, or teams. As a result knowledge has problem to flow through strata of the enterprise.

On the other hand, memos, meetings, or emails coming from all parts of the company are submerging the employees with information unfortunately filtered and sanitized through several layers of formal approvals.

The Advantages
Although large organizations can be victims of the aforementioned traits, Apple, Google, Amazon, or IBM, to name a few, show that they can also benefit from their size to enjoy tremendous advantages when talking about innovation.

To start with, these large companies have not reached their size by luck. Over time, they have accumulated a good understanding of the market and the regulations, they have established trusted partners, they are good at what they are doing, and thanks to their long experience they have built a significant customer base.

This can be transformed into a very large network of innovative resources: the partners, the customers, and their sizable internal staff can be turned into as many sources for new ideas, as many sounding boards for new initiatives, and as many testing groups for feedbacks along the product or service development cycle. This broad audience is not only rich in terms of size, but also very valuable in terms of expertize range; a substantial key success driver to think out of the box.

Beside the advantages brought by these external and internal people, the large organizations can boost their innovative capabilities thanks to their financial resources. A sizable enterprise can indeed invest more money for creating and experimenting new products and services. They also have stronger resilience to failure. Whereas the lack of success for innovation project can bring down a small enterprise, such a failure will not affect so significantly a large company. As failures being one the key success factors to learn and innovate, these deeper financial resources can be directly correlated to innovation potential of the company.

Enhancement of the innovation capabilities
Thanks to the features available through enterprise 2.0 technologies, these large organizations can reduce some of the drawbacks related to their size, and improve some of their advantages.

Although an ideation platform is not the panacea to innovate, such a system can break the information silos stifling the communication by adding informal channels based on social media layers. An ideation platform is also proved very effective and efficient to tap into the collective wisdom of the business partners, the customer base, and the internal staff. Thanks to the web, submission of ideas and collaboration around the best ones is not limited anymore by the size of the meeting room. The number of contributors can be potentially be in the thousand range.

Conclusion
The size factor of large organizations can hinder their innovation capabilities because process rigidity and communication overload. On the other hand their size can be turned into an advantage if they reach out to their business partners, their clients, and the internal staff for new ideas. Their deeper financial resources also help them to invest more in innovation initiatives, and to better resist to the downfalls, should some of these initiatives fail.

Having an ideation platform can be a mean to reduce the size drawbacks, and to further leverage the related advantages.

Enterprise 2.0

Since we're talking about Enterprise 2.0 all of the time, it might be interesting to share some thoughts about what that term means today and how it has developed over time.

To be put very generally, Enterprise 2.0 means the use of all the social and collaboration tools that have evolved to be called Web 2.0 within a company or enterprise.

Though the term Enterprise 2.0 still seems to be quite recent, the trend to use these tools has begun already many years ago. I remember that in the summer of 2005 I joined a software development project where almost the complete documentation was kept in a Wiki to which everybody had access to add or update the specifications as needed. I think this was the first time that I personally got into contact with what is nowadays known as Enterprise 2.0.

Back in 2006 Andrew McAfee published his article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration and thus coined the term.

The software tools that are usually considered to belong to Enterprise 2.0 are, among others, blogs, Wikis, collaboration tools, idea and knowledge management tools. These are the kind of applications that work best (or only) when users are actively participating, which means that the introduction of these tools needs to be accompanied by changes in the everyday way of working. Things should become much more bottom-up than top-down. Employees need to be encouraged to openly share their ideas, knowledge, expertise, experiences, and even criticism. The Enterprise 2.0 tools can help employees to communicate across organizational and geographical boundaries. Specialists working at similar challenges in different departments or locations should have a place in the company intranet to get together and learn from one another - that's the vision behind the buzzword. The Internet shows that this can work beautifully and that large and valuable knowledge repositories can emerge if many people are actively contributing.

One of the most central points of Enterprise 2.0 is not a technical or a software issue however, but a challenging social task - the building of communities. Social and collaboration tools, when introduced in a company, will always need some sort of support and even push from management - the more senior the better. It will take time and hard and dedicated work to encourage the employees to really use the tools once they have been provided to them. This is probably the most underestimated challenge on the way to become a type 2.0 enterprise. This is about people, processes, and organizational structures much more than about the software tools.

Another quite different area of Enterprise 2.0 is the use of social and collaboration tools to communicate across company boundaries - with suppliers, clients, and even the general public. This area has seen dramatic developments over the years, and it's the most visible one. Nowadays it is already commonplace to see company blogs, discussion boards, and wikis, especially for companies that are delivering directly to end users. Those tools are a means to reach out to the customers, build brand loyalty, collect ratings and feedback, and connect the customers to the specialists and customer support. Discussion boards, monitored regularly, can provide early-warning signs for trouble ahead. Though they provide invaluable services, they are also time- and work-intensive to set up and maintain, which must always be kept in mind when planning to move into the Enterprise 2.0 world.

Finally, I'd just like to recommend a small series of three very informative podcasts from KPMG that are a good short introduction to the Enterprise 2.0 topic, though they are already a few years old. Most things that are said, apart from a few company names, are still fully valid today. If you're interested, you can find them here.

Idea and Innovation Management at Cambridge Technology Partners

Innovation is not a nice-to-have anymore, but a must-have. It has to change from being a single event in your company, to a systematic process becoming the corner stone of your organization which will enable a sustainable competitive advantage.

Cambridge Technology Partners helps you to implement your innovation strategy and get results. This goal is realized by applying the proper governance, establishing a culture fostering creativity, engaging the right tools, leveraging the best practices from the industry, and by defining the underlying processes.

Thanks to our experience and our partnership with key players, our company can provide you with a holistic end-to-end solution from the collection of ideas to the implementation of new innovative products or services.

Based on Spigit, the leading ideation tool, our solutions scale with your organization and leverage your technical landscape. Whatever your innovation challenges are, CTP is your trusted partner to make innovation part of your organization DNA.

CTP shall be at the SuisseEMEX (23rd to 25th August, Messe Zurich). Come and visit us in Hall 4; Booth number 4.324 (Registration).

CTP at SuisseEMEX, Zurich, 23-25 August 2011

SuisseEMEX is Switzerland’s leading B2B trade show for marketing, communication, event and pro-motion. The fifth edition is held from August 23th to August 25th 2011 in the Exhibition Center Zurich. In 2010 over 370 national and international exhibitors attracted around 13’000 industry experts and decision makers. SuisseEMEX is «TURNING VISIONS INTO BUSINESS» even more focused and target-group-specific in 2011.

The exhibitors are clearly divided into groups under three main categories in the four exhibition halls:

• Marketing / Communication
• Promotion / Promotional Items
  
• Events / Live Communication

Attractive theme areas and expert forums are spread throughout the halls. Lounges, bars and communication zones provide inviting locations for business networking and talking shop. Exhibitors and visitors can profit from the contacts made before, during and after the trade show.

Come and visit CTP in Hall 4; Booth number 4.324 (Registration)

Date:	Tuesday, 23 August, 2011 - Thursday, 25 August, 2011
Location:	Messe Zürich
More Information:	www.suisse-emex.ch

Partnership between Cambridge Technology Partners and Spigit

Idea and innovation management increasingly important for sustainable business success

Nyon/Zurich – July 18, 2011 – Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), leading Swiss IT consulting company, is pleased to announce a partnership with Spigit, leading provider of collective idea and innovation management software. CTP is already involved in several projects that aim to promote innovation. With this partnership, CTP is further strengthening its consultancy and implementation expertise in this fast-growing market segment.

Solutions for idea and innovation management bring genuine added value to companies, and demand is correspondingly growing; for example, market researchers at Gartner estimate that over the next two to five years, applications for idea and innovation management will reach the mass market. CTP supports customers with its experience in resolving organizational challenges of innovation management, and in identifying effective innovation processes to put them – combined with its functional know-how and project management expertise – into place.

The partnership with Spigit allows CTP to optimally address customers’ needs for comprehensive solutions in the field of idea and innovation management. Spigit’s applications enable organisations to collect and to develop the ideas of employees, business partners and customers in an effective, efficient and organised manner, and to transform the most promising ones into concrete implementation projects. This means companies are able to activate their whole collective intelligence and to use their entire innovation potential, to reinforce or expand their market position.

“Innovations are crucially important to long-term success”, says Vijay Srinivasan, CEO of Cambridge Technology Partners. “Companies of all sizes have to continuously reinvent themselves in order to defend their market position or to gain additional market shares. Our long-standing consulting experience in combination with the leading solution for idea and innovation management from Spigit helps customers to execute corresponding initiatives and to implement the associated necessary processes. By this means, innovation is made a constant companion, and not a once-off event.”

Project Management 2.0

Project Management 2.0 (or PM 2.0) is a new term that is becoming more and more popular, but the exact definition is still unclear to many people. In short, PM 2.0 is a term used to describe an evolution of project management practices using the support of Web 2.0 technologies aiming to increase team productivity, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Let’s look as an example at a typical day of a project manager. The daily tasks consist of checking emails for projects updates, call or email team members to make sure everything is on track and elaborate reports to the senior management. With less administrative work, project managers would be able to concentrate more on the leadership part of the management job. With a PM 2.0 concept the top-down conceptions of managing projects are giving way to a new model, one where the manager’s role has less controller or overseer responsibilities and more emphasis is placed on the ability to plan, adapt and communicate – as a leader.

The following table is a comparison between traditional Project management and PM2.0:

Traditional Project Management	Project Management 2.0
Centralization of control	Decentralization of control
Top-down planning	Bottom-up planning
Authoritarian environment	Collaborative environment
Implied structure	Emergent structures
Limited/Restricted Access to the plan	Organized/Unlimited Access to the plan
Local Access to information	Global/Live Access to information
Limited Communications within team	Unlimited Communications within team
Separate projects	Holistic approach
Overly complex tools	Easy to use tools
Rigidity of tools	Flexibility of tools

PM 2.0 relies on the same concept as Enterprise 2.0. So, while the collective intelligence helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-to-date picture of operations, the Web 2.0 tools will boost the efficiency of teams and at the same time reduce the daily routine, leaving room for creativity and leadership.

Switzerland is #1 in term of innovation. Thanks to your company?

INSEAD, the famous French business school, has just published its renowned yearly Global Innovation Index (GII). Switzerland takes the top slot of the 2011 edition. This country moved up three places since 2010.

This annual study investigates the “input pillars” (factors enabling innovation) and the “output pillars” (actual achievements in innovation) and drills down many layers to get a composite innovation rating for 125 countries.

Booz & Company, one of the report contributors says, “The ability to innovate is the great equalizer in the global economy. In the industrial era, nations relied on their natural resources to compete. Today, any country can advance with carefully focused investments in talent and R&D. The performance of some emerging economies in this year’s GII shows what nations can accomplish with a focus on building 21st century economies.”

This top ranking shows that the Swiss enterprises benefit from a very healthy milieu to engage on the innovation path: stable political environment, good business and market sophistication, performing research institutes, and large scientific outputs.

Does your company leverage these encouraging conditions to their full extend ? Does your management capitalize on this positive environment? Is your organizational culture “yes we can” oriented?

If you are just focusing on the problems related to the cost of labor and the weight of the Swiss currency, you might want to consider widening up the scope of efforts and dedicate some time on the opportunities by using the ideal innovation oriented environment at your disposal.

Global Innovation Index 2011: http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii/main/fullreport/index.html

Office 365 launched - first reactions

The long awaited online collaboration platform from Microsoft Office 365 was finally launched today and the web has been buzzing with launch related articles and reviews especially comparing Office 365 with Google Docs - it's main competitor.

Here's a very interesting comparison done by InformationWeek link and the "official" view from Mountain View link .

HR Marketing and the advent of Social Media

Social Media, Social Networking, facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and what not..everyone seems to be talking about it. User numbers are exploding and enterprises are just waking up to the cultural revolution happening all around us.

The problem put simply is that most of us are using Social Networking and Media platforms privately extensively or very extensively (e.g. 95% of students are using Social Networking platforms regularly, more than 60% several times a day [Source: Center for Community College Student Engagement, USA]) but inside our companies and professional organisations we are not making use of these modern collaboration tools.

s gap is becoming more critical in the area of HR Marketing, as new recruits and special talents want to get contacted and learn about their prospective employer in a context which they use naturally i.e. Social Media and Networking platforms.

In the diagram above I tried to highlight typical functional areas for HR Marketing and which solutions are available in the market. Externally facing sites like facebook or LinkedIn lend themselves particularly well for Recruitment of new Talent whereby internally facing solutions like Sharepoint or Huddle provide a good fit for team collaboration and knowledge management.

However especially with Sharepoint internal Social Networking is not available straight forward out of the box. To bridge this gap here at CTP we have developed a business accelerator which we call “myConnections” to provide LinkedIn or facebook style features completely embedded in Sharepoint. More to follow in another post. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the CTP Portal & Collaboration blog ! Stay tuned for new and exciting stories from the world of web2.0/enterprise2.0.