Ana Andjelic and I have just started a discussion around how to best organize for innovation. (BTW, if you aren’t already a reader you should really check out Ana’s blog, i [love] marketing.) Rather than continue the conversation in the comments thread I thought it might be good to bring it over to the blog.
Ana recently wrote an interesting piece about the impact of organizational structure and systems on performance. In it, she cited a post I wrote on the role of polymaths in innovation. The gist of my post was that there is evidence that individuals with a broad, diverse knowledge base contribute more to innovation than highly specialized “experts”. Ana claimed that what is likely more important than polymaths is the connections between them. On this point I would also agree.
Weak vs. Strong Ties in a Social Network
The discussion has now turned to how you structure an organization to maximize the likelihood of individuals bumping into others with different sets of knowledge. And away we go…
I wrote the other day that, for me, the big payoff of social media is that it both exposes people to perspectives and knowledge-sets that they normally would not come into contact with. This accomplishes two things: 1) it can help destabilize stale ways of thinking and 2) prevent such stasis from setting in going forward. Social media can also help bring individuals together to collectively problem solve and create. Social media can be as active or passive as one wants it to be. It can be engaged so that people “bump” into new and interesting people (case in point, Ana and I just bumped into each other via our blogs–we were not formally introduced or looking for each other or people with our respective skills, etc.), or it can be used to actively organize a diverse group of minds with the goal of solving a complex problem.
So I would say that to encourage innovative thinking we want to use social technologies to structure collaborations between diverse individuals both within and outside of organizations. For each problem, you would want to bring together differing perspectives from within the organization. There are now platforms that facilitate the crowdsourcing of internal expertise (e.g. Imaginatik), not necessarily crowds outside the organization. This would have the added advantage of preventing the kind of social network ossification (where we end up going back to the same people over and over again for insights) that Ana worries about. Additionally, we can and should add an external module to this as well. Having ready access to external experts further increases the possible diversity of opinion to draw from. This can be done by tapping into an expert network (such as Gerson Lehrman Group, the firm I work for) as well as leveraging external crowdsourcing platforms (e.g. Chaordix).
Another idea is to make social media and social technologies mandatory for all workers. You can set up internal networks and have those networks integrate with external networks to maximize the likelihood of “intellectual bumping”.
So there are some initial thoughts. What do you think?
7 responses so far ↓
Organizing for Innovation: A conversation with Ana Andjelic | USA Business News // October 25, 2009 at 4:46 pm |
[...] Original post: Organizing for Innovation: A conversation with Ana Andjelic [...]
Ana Andjelic // October 26, 2009 at 1:36 pm |
Bill, a few comments on both this and your “You Don’t Always Know What you Want” post.
It’s true – knowledge “reshuffling” is key to innovation (or, as you said “when it comes to thinking, we need more disruption, not less.”) This reshuffling, however, creates a lot of “noise” (how do you know what you are looking for before you find it?), and ultimately accounts for less-than-efficient organization, because it creates crazy transaction costs.
And reduction of transaction costs is what made firms show up in the first place (in opposition to markets), as Ronald Coase would have said.
So, the very condition that’s critical for generation of new knowledge and/or recombining old and new knowledge is actually detrimental for efficiency. The question then is, how to combine organizational efficiency with innovation?
Ok, I’ll be a little bit more specific now. You noted that in order to solve a complex problem “you would want to bring together differing perspectives from within the organization.” But – how do you know who knows what? By the time you find out, there’s going to be a lot of time and resources lost (e.g. attention, search, etc.) And if you know who knows what, well, then you are just repeating your past searches, right? That’s the first problem.
Second problem is that, even if you create conditions for people to bump into each other repeatedly (or expose them to social networking and crowdsourcing software), they will still gravitate towards “local” solutions – that is, towards those resources they used in the past. Simply, they don’t have time/energy/attention to do search over again each time they need to solve a problem by a certain deadline (think efficiency).
And then, there’s the third, practical problem. While it’s technologically possible to set up internal networks and to “have those networks integrate with external networks to maximize the likelihood of intellectual bumping”, as you say, there are very few – if any – places that would open up their internal, proprietary data to external networks. So intellectual property goes against intellectual bumping.
All of this said, making organizations more innovative is a work-in-progress. There are different success stories for sure. I like a lot your idea of making social media and technologies mandatory for all workers. Much better than having a Chief Innovation Officer.
uberVU - social comments // October 26, 2009 at 6:55 pm |
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by BillPetti: Organizing for Innovation: A conversation with Ana Andjelic: http://wp.me/pB5tD-fx | chat on weak ties, social networks, and innovation…
The Firm, Transaction Costs, and Organizing for Innovation « bill | petti // October 27, 2009 at 9:29 pm |
[...] 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment Ana Anjdelic responded to my latest post with some very interesting points. She commented that some of my suggestions [...]
While I am traveling… « bill | petti // November 4, 2009 at 4:58 am |
[...] marketing. It is an interesting piece that dovetails nicely with the discussion we recently had around how to organize for innovation. Digital agencies impress clients with their passion, drive and [...]
‘Does your mind set = my data set?’ « bill | petti // November 10, 2009 at 7:32 am |
[...] presentation drove home two points for me: the importance of challenging our assumptions, the impact of data visualization, and the power of relational [...]
Oldschool Social Networking « bill | petti // November 26, 2009 at 9:12 am |
[...] The rationale for the group sounds quite similar to claims about the importance of social networks, organizing for innovation, and the power of weak ties: When Robert Menschel, a senior director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was considering deals [...]