As you may know, we were working on a SaaS version of Knowledge Plaza for professionals and small companies. We launched a private beta subscription process about 2 months ago (did you sign up?) and we are thrilled to announce the private beta is ready to rumble!
So we’d like to invite you to come and see Knowledge Plaza SaaS next Thursday 21st at Betagroup where Antoine Perdaens, our COO, will show you the main benefits of KP SaaS for your small business.
What’s Betagroup? The BetaGroup is a group of 2.100 Web Entrepreneurs in Belgium passionate about Internet, Software, Mobile Technologies and Online Media. They organize monthly meetings at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where startups and investors are introduced and connected. Attendance is free but you need to book your spot here.
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.
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.
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