Innovation For Growth

Innovating the business and management processes and practices of regional SMEs

On-line Collaboration:

where social, content and technology meet

Mike Parsons and Mary Rose,IEED, Lancaster University,IFG Workshop, 5 May 2011

About us

• Our collaboration• We represent a ‘new

combination’• Mike Parsons –

businessman, Karrimor, OMM Ltd, Innovator in Residence, IEED

• Mary Rose, academic, business historian

• Invisible on Everest : Innovation and the Gear Makers (2003)

• Innovation a result not an objective

 

Beyond Invisible on Everest

• Shared knowledge and trust• Innovation Courses• Innovation for Extremes • www.innovation-for-extremes

.net• A  OMM Ltd a business start-

up 2005• IEED

Where has this led?

153 mini innovation case studies per year

Emerging technologies a new element of Innovation for Extremes

Hands on experience of building collaborative working for teaching and business

Aims of Session

1. Why collaborate?

2. How to collaborate, with or without digital technologies

3. Matching technologies to needs and maybe combining them

 To begin the process of developing a live collaborative community using Central Desktop

Icebreaker

The task :At your tables tell each other :

1 About your business2 How you currently collaborate

3 Reasons for attending4 Summarise on Flip chart 

5 Appoint spokesperson who will feed back to whole course

Why collaborate and with whom? The gains 

Within company

Key driving factor - decentralisation

pre - requisite to collaboration is information SHARING

(Cross-functional) communities of practice

TEAM - the power of a team is enormousPOTENTIAL -

Higher project success rate More Innovation/content/

Streamlined processes leading to -Earlier to market  

Why Collaborate and with whom?

Outside Company

‘ There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are

inside’ Tapscott, Wikinomics (2006)

Suppliers and even competitors

Customers

How do an academic and a businessman collaborate?

Different worlds but shared practice

‘Learning by doing’

Supported and shaped by technology

1+1 = 3

Ways to collaborate

Origins of Online Collaboration

1950s and 1960s origins of internet

1970s Computer Conferencing, Bulletin Boards

1989 Tim Berners Lee invents World Wide Web

1990s spread of World Wide Web - Web 1.0 Access through browsing

2005 Web 2.0 Read/write web - Blogging, social media, Wikipedia, mass collaboration

'Cloud Computing' the battle in the cloudsSaaS/PaaS/IaaS

 Examples SaaS www.salesforce.com Microsoft, Azure Oct 2008

PaaSBPOS Federal

Google, 'Gov Cloud'Rackspace

 IaaS

Amazon early mover EC2Google UGov

 Yahoo&HP&Intel Jul 2008

Oracle start up 2010?

Client

APPLICATION SaaS Software as a service

PLATFORM PaaS Platform as a service

INFRASTRUCTURE IaaS Infrastructure as a Service

Server

Where Social Content and Technology meet

Some collaborative tools

Collaborative platforms

That's an introduction to the technology but how about collaboration? Stage 1 How do people in your business communicate? How do the ‘communities’ in your business function?

 What is needed?What is possible?

Communication and

collaboration

Technology

People

Collaborative success

trust

language, behaviour, expectations -comes with shared experience and 'history'

developing shared vision and practice

And what can go wrong?

Time and money wasted

Involvement but not engagement

Breach of trust 

Technology without social !

Collaboration in practiceCollaboration is like an orchestra : all play individual notes but

work together

•Varying Business Cultures

Type of BusinessProcessesAttitudes and what is valuedHow things are doneWhat is expected

 

Collaboration Processes

MeetingsOpen Ended conversations

ProjectsContent

Access to expertise Relationships

Individual participation Community Cultivation

Serving a Context

Processes carried out in a 'community of practice' 

 Where a sharing of experience and practice so shared:

Language, expectations, understanding

Tacit knowledge

Building community Stage 1 Function Why do you want your community for ?

•How are they organised now?•Where are participants based?•What logistical preparation needed?• How to schedule?• Will 'meetings' be synchronous or asynchronous?

Meetings

•How are these organised now?•How will they handle co-authoring?•Role of practice to build understanding?

Project based community

•How is co-authorship of content achieved now?•What critiquing processes are used?•Types of content Content

Building Community: Stage 2 Understanding the people involved in the community

Past experience

of technology

Communication

style

Shared understan

ding, language

Building Community : Stage 3 making Choices of Technology

go for free stuff

use open

source tools

get commer

cial platform

patch element

s together

build your own

Building the Community : Stage 4 making the community environment collaborative

Collaboration

Meetings

 

Case StudiesLead User

OMM CDT

IEED CDT

Tricouni

Sakai Innovation

 IFG site