The best companies, like General Electric and McKinsey, accelerate innovation during recessions. They know that their people have a little more time to think, and they encourage them to think boldly and creatively. Tom Davenport (cited in Whatever-Company’s whitepaper on “Using Enterprise 2.0 for recovery”)

Intellectual capital, the intangible resource that comes from your workers, from your collaborators, clients and partners, is a fundamental source of any business competitive advantage. According to A. Bonfour and L. Edvinsson adding value in the knowledge economy is inextricably linked to radical change in both societal assumptions and business models. In the end, capitalism may not create value if it is obsessed with competition to the detriment of collaboration.

The so-called Enterprise 2.0 has been proposed as an approach to manage and foster the intangible in tangible ways. It is surely enabled by web-based technologies but far beyond just being a compilation of tools, it’s something more around ‘making the web work for business’—some blendo idea that allows E2.0 to mean a) the adoption of web tools and culture within the enterprise, b) the use of the web to better connect the enterprise to the greater world, and c) most specifically, the use of web 2.0 IT principles to reinvent enterprise IT, (like cloud computing, AJAX, web services, and so on) (Stowe Boyd dixit, cited at ITSinsider)

Here at Whatever, we believe that for any organization or business wanting to drive their business forward, the sharing of information and collaborative knowledge is a necessary step to achieve the pervasive benefits of the new knowledge economy model. For the past months, we’ve been working on “Using Enterprise 2.0 to prepare for recovery”, a whitepaper that is the outcome of an analysis and review of the opinions of some of the most important experts and firms in the field of knowledge management such as Sun’s CLO, Karie Willyerd; SAP chairman, Henning Kagermann; Ann Handley from MarketingProfs, Tom Davenport from Bobson College and Penny Morey from RemarkAbleHR.

This paper (available for free download) should be seen as the starting point for analyzing the benefits of introducing the enterprise 2.0 framework to your organization and attempts to position collaborative knowledge as a backup and stable solution during business and economic downturns.

You can get your copy now at www.knowledgeplaza.be.

Using Entreprise 2.0 to prepare for recovery – Whitepaper

Following up the discussion triggered by our previous post on Enterprise 2.0 for recovery (soon a second part on our whitepaper on the issue), a word that’s key to understanding what businesses, professionals and companies need to elbow their way in current market jungle has finally showed up: innovation.

Innovation, imho, happens when by facing whichever strategic challenges you and your team find a new approach (and this happens at all levels, from less to more sophisticated, and not necessarily technologically driven). And that’s something you can hardly achieve on your own: internal and external cooperation becomes essential. That requires open and sustainable innovation.

I recommend watching this video, where Jutta Treviranus, Director of Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto, discusses collaboration over competition in innovative societies, especially interesting the focus on assumptions.

“If you don’t change, you can become extinct”

This quote doesn’t come from Darwin’s The Origin of Species… but from the contemporary and more profane fable Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson.

This morning I had breakfast reading an angry comment by some shoe store owner on the Facebook page of a shoe manufacturer because the manufacturer had decided to boost their e-shop initiative, combined with offline distribution to shoe stores. The shoe retailer felt betrayed and thought it was unfair competition and blamed the shoe manufacturer for the downturn in sales by shoe retailers, by embracing the online initiative and threatened him not to buy their products anymore. I couldn’t help but participate and asked the angry retailer what he was planning to do, and he basically said he’d do nothing because it wasn’t his fault. I told him that things are changing (actually they are always changing) and that benefits and success are much more likely to happen when open innovation and collaboration takes place between suppliers, collaborators, intermediaries and customers. He called me an ‘engineer’…

That’s just a very specific example of what’s been happening and is still happening in many sectors. What could be the reason for this? Quote from Who Moved My Cheese: “they just assumed it would be there” and I add: forever.

In our current economic situation, where there’s an excess of supply but scarcity of demand or rather a very distributed demand (of goods or of information, for instance), what are you doing to innovate? Are you listening to all actors who could help you? Are you integrating them? How?

What did you do in your organization or business when you decided it was time to stop (over) analyzing? What’s your story of success (even partial or evolving) for others/us to learn?