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…

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.