Collaborate to innovate

DAV's recent Enigma Roundtable 'Collaborate to Innovate' took place at Quaglinos restaurant in London. The Roundtable, led by DAV managing director, Charlie Mayes and chief operating officer Andrew Moore featured representatives from Enigma co-sponsoring companies Information Age, Use Your Noggin, and Adept4 plus representatives from BT, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters Markets, QinetiQ and 3i.

The consensus was that while collaboration tools, which include wikis and Instant Messaging, can be effective, they are no panacea. There is a lot of work in progress, but also a lack of clarity about where we will end up. Collaborative tools are finding their way into organisations, but it is also necessary to offer people an incentive to use them, including the provision of top-down executive support. Ultimately people will only use collaboration if they want to use it and they also see a benefit in doing so.

Critically, there is a need for collaborative innovation and the use of the tools that fundamentally enable it, to be managed. This is the only way to ensure a tangible outcome that delivers real benefit to the business. And for businesses who want to get real value out of collaboration, there is still some way to go. One of the key concepts, however, that is generally accepted to be useful is that of 'presence' - the ability to be able to 'click to call' because you know someone is available, rather than calling in the hope that they may pick up the phone.

'Outside-in' thinking is already working. Procter & Gamble is the world's biggest maker of household goods, and it decided in 2001 to source half of all new innovations from collaboration outside the company. Its programme, 'Connect + Develop', is an initiative that allows people to submit new innovations online. The venture has been a success, with 42 percent of all P&G's new technologies now generated from outside sources.

This collaborative working model is now being applied to industries such as aviation and the automotive world where fierce competition has previously ruled out such partnerships. So, in challenging economic times, with costs and efficiency at a premium, how many other organisations are also thinking the unthinkable and collaborating to drive innovation? And how will the phenomenal growth in social networking influence this?

There is no doubt that developing an effective social network can be something of a challenge, especially if the network is aimed at the upper echelons of an organisation, where, perhaps surprisingly, given the use of executive tools such as LinkedIn, business leaders still remain largely unaware of social networking and its effect on collaboration.

One of the ongoing issues for many organisations is that given staff's familiarity with intuitive sites such as Facebook, organisations want to be able to create that familiar look and feel in-house. Often, however, such internally developed Facebook-like user interfaces can be too complicated and lack usability, meaning that despite the executive encouragement, staff will only use them under duress.

For some organisations, there is inevitably some apprehension about working collaboratively with potential competitors. Ultimately, such a relationship must be based on trust. If you're working with other parties where there is a prerequisite to share resources, do you trust them? The roundtable discussed how, for collaboration to work, you have to have trust - and especially have trust in people to deliver.

To read the complete 'Collaborate to Innovate' Roundtable report, please click on the adjacent link.

The Enigma Group has been developed by DAV and its partners to extend the collective knowledge of our teams and help more organisations solve the riddle of complex IT-enabled business change programmes, faster. The next Enigma event, on 12th May 2009, will discuss the importance of exceeding client expectations by delivering a great service experience. It will be held at the Conran restaurant, Bluebird, in London.