batte n br iefi n g inspiring the world through entrepreneurship and innovation
FEB 2013
The Double-Edged Sword of Collaboration Technologies Innovators' roundtable, FALL 2012. CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA.
Batten Institute
[Even] inside the same company we’re dispersed all over the world … We need different kinds of glue to hold these networked organizations together … The glue that we’re putting in place now … is the informal, spontaneous, collaborative, knowledge-based glue that comes with 2.0 tools and social business.” 1
glinskam@darden.virginia.edu
Andrew McAfee, author of “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent
contributors
Malgorzata Glinska Senior Researcher
Amy Halliday Writer and Editorial Consultant Batten Institute hallidaya@aol.com
Collaboration” In the ongoing pursuit of innovation, many large companies use a variety of networkbased collaboration technologies to unearth new ideas, connect employees and create
seamless flows of information. And yet, therein lie some troubling ironies: technologies that are supposed to increase productivity and innovation can be a burden for the busy professionals who must learn how to use them. In an era of chronic collaboration, it’s
actually harder to have a conversation. Open innovation tools often generate an overwhelming torrent of ideas and input.
In short, the new collaboration technologies that promise tremendous benefits also
present complex management challenges. To overcome them, companies need specific capabilities.
The third gathering of the Innovators’ Roundtable, hosted by the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation on 4 October 2012, brought together innovation
executives and Darden faculty members for a candid discussion of the use of technology to further corporate innovation.
innovators' roundtable Report
Collaborative Innovation Technologies SOCIAL BUSINESS APPLICATIONS Facebook and Twitter have forever changed the way people interact on the Web. Now, social-networking applications aimed at
Videoconferencing, web-enabled meetings, social-networking platforms—these
tools are giving companies sophisticated ways to connect and engage diverse constituencies. Motivations vary, but corporations generally use them for:
the workplace are changing the way people
•
harvesting ideas both internally and externally
work. They are based on the premise that
•
finding breakthrough applications for inventions
•
allowing real-time communication among geographically dispersed
features that enhance collaboration and
•
engaging customers in co-creation activities
communication. These applications let us-
•
connecting people with complex questions to the experts who have answers
•
linking players in an innovation ecosystem in ways that transform supply chains
e-mail is not the most efficient way to collaborate, especially among geographically dispersed employees, and they share many
ers create profiles, post status updates, tap their in-house experts to help advance projects, form discussion groups and communities, share documents and “follow” each other in real time—all in a relatively secure environment. Social business applications also allow employees to communicate and collaborate with their customers and business partners. Many companies are getting in on the act, offering new social-networking tools for business, such as: CHATTER from Salesforce.com Jive 6 from Jive Software Lotus Connections from IBM Tibbr from Tibco Software WebEx Social from Cisco Systems
professionals
and revolutionize business models
The proliferation of high-tech collaborative-innovation tools and the speed with
which they are evolving bring new challenges that senior executives are only now
coming to comprehend. “There’s a paradigm change that we don’t fully understand,” said Corning’s senior vice president of global research, Gary S. Calabrese. Just like
innovation itself, getting the most from these tools entails experimentation and trial and error. It also requires several competencies, most of which are decidedly lowtech.
Screening and Evaluating Ideas Executives in large organizations who have had experience with open innovation—
both internal and external—know that intensive idea generation enabled by the lat-
est technology is not enough to boost their companies’ innovation capacity. Ideation tools can generate large quantities of information, but it’s high-quality information and interpretation that companies are after.
Yammer from Yammer, Inc. (acquired by Microsoft)
Technology is playing a big role in generating ideas. It gives everyone a voice. There’s such an inundation of ideas that you often end up with this cacophony of opinions and no clear point of view. There’s a presumption that all contributions are equally informed and important, and that’s a real downside of this electronic collaboration.” R. Lemuel Lasher, Chief Innovation Officer, CSC There is a need now to curate information, to cull what is truly meaningful and
relevant from all that is not. In large part this capability is an intellectual one; it’s
the ability to discern the essence of complex issues, filter out noise and synthesize disparate pieces of data.
2
Batten briefing innovators’ roundtable report
You’re probably going to get some hits if you get a lot of ideas flowing. Experienced people can add a lot of value to directing this traffic of ideas from crowdsourcing. In the technology space, you want people who are very seasoned, have expertise, but can also see the future.”
SOCIAL TASK-MANAGEMENT TOOLS Many enterprise social-networking vendors emphasize that their products go beyond ad hoc sharing and chitchat and actually help employees to get work done. Social task-management applications help group interactions around tasks and link tasks to deadlines,
Charles R. Craig, Senior Vice President of Science & Technology,
progress milestones and other data for proj-
Corning Inc.
ect tracking.
Some companies are dealing with this challenge by tapping their most experienced people and even using networks that extend beyond the firm’s boundaries to sort
through large quantities of information. But seasoned employees are not necessarily the ones who will gravitate toward disruptive ideas, and engaging large numbers of people in the vetting of information can raise intellectual property issues.
ASANA offers a social task-management tool that lets users see what others are doing and comment on it. Managers can easily follow what employees have placed as their top priorities and how they are progressing on various projects. “Instead of a social graph,” said Asana’s cofounder, Justin Rosenstein,
The question is, where in the value chain do you position an innovative idea to grab the most value from it? That’s critical to innovation.”
“we want to give you a work graph, a task
Michael J. Lenox, Samuel L. Slover Research Professor of Business,
and the next goal, and the next goal after
Associate Dean and Executive Director, Batten Institute
that—all that management of work driving to
graph of all the things you’re working on or have worked on—where you can see at a glance what things you need to accomplish,
the successful completion of projects.”3
Online expert communities can also generate large volumes of questions and sug-
SPARQLIGHT is another start-up that offers
highest-ranking scientists, who respond to queries within 24 hours, sometimes even
The Sparqlight user interface borrows social
gestions that must be managed. Some companies staff online help desks with their
an enterprise social workflow application.
deploying ad hoc teams to address big challenges. To avoid taking these profession-
media conventions such as an activity stream
als out of the lab for too long—and to increase the efficiency of these sites—some
companies are creating communities around extremely specific subspecialties so that people are more likely to find the exact expertise they need.
There is, of course, also a danger in bringing together large groups of people on
social network platforms—even within one company. “You could be connecting the
wrong people; you could have people who aren’t experts giving advice,” said Darden’s Michael Lenox. Alcoa’s executive vice president and chief technology officer,
and notifications from one’s contacts, but it is structured around assigning tasks and recording progress against them. As chief marketing officer Michael Weir explained, his company is “taking social and wrapping it around tasks you do every day and making them assignable, taggable, trackable and measurable. Those tasks can then be strung together to create an improvisational workflow.”4
Raymond J. Kilmer, also acknowledged that danger. “There are always people who can be highly influential in a system who aren’t the right people to be the proper
decision makers,” he said. “At times, they can cause destructive and dysfunctional
outcomes.” But that happens in face-to-face interactions, too. Ultimately, technology magnifies both the positive and negative aspects of collaboration.
3
Speed The new technologies both enable and require speed, a capability that companies
aspire to in all areas. Often, the act of dealing with a huge volume of information necessitates a culture shift. “You must be prepared to jump on things faster, work smarter,” said Corning’s Calabrese.
Some companies choose to speed up their stage-gate innovation processes so that
they can evaluate more new-product ideas, identify the obstacles to scientists’ ability to conduct more experiments and reduce time-to-market by removing slack from supply chain interactions.
With the pressure to innovate faster, combined with the speed and volume of new
We had to change our culture and how we operate. You must be prepared to jump on things faster, work smarter. We are continually under pressure to do things faster.” Gary S. Calabrese, Senior Vice President, Global Research, Corning Inc.
ideas that must be evaluated and tested, it is easy to get overwhelmed. “You want customer input, but then you get too much,” Darden’s Lenox said. Even though
companies can benefit by inviting ideas from customers, collaboration on a vast scale creates growing demands on scientists’ time. Corning’s Craig cited his company’s
agile innovation initiative, which led to 12- to 18-month product cycles. “We do a
much more rapid prototyping phase with customers, and we iterate,” he said. “That’s challenging for people.”
Speed, like volume, presents intellectual property challenges. “We try to advance an idea, but we need to put the IP in place faster,” said Craig. Many companies have launched internal IP education efforts and reexamined their patent strategies.
The latest technology does not always guarantee increased speed. In fact, it often has the opposite effect. “Scientists tell us, ‘IT makes me slow. Now I got upgraded. Do I
have to spend hours learning the new Microsoft Office?’” said Calabrese. Because of technology, scientists often have to handle chores—such as travel arrangements and
procurement—that used to be the responsibility of administrative support staff. This extra work takes them away from research.
4
Batten briefing innovators’ roundtable report
Fit It’s crucial to apply the right tools to the right tasks. Too often, there’s a mismatch. There’s the familiar example of e-mail, which can be extremely useful for quick
check-ins but does not work well for conversations among a large number of people, especially if users copy too many recipients and clog their inboxes with large attachments.
“The technology is all around us, but ultimately it’s about the etiquette of using it;
we have to know how to use it effectively,” said Shubber Ali, vice president of strategic innovation at Salesforce.com. “If you use it incorrectly—for example, if you cc 30 people on an e-mail—you know what happens.”
Teleconferences are also not ideally suited to productive conversations, which generally need some face-to-face interaction and the sharing of visual images. Videocon-
Innovation is ultimately a social process, and the ability to see and hear each other is important for proper communication. Appropriate videoconferencing technologies can help to accomplish that.” Alex Cedeno, Vice President of Global Innovation, MeadWestvaco
ferencing is often the best tool in this context.
Despite the promise and potential of collaboration technologies, predictions that
online tools will render obsolete traditional face-to-face collaboration are unfounded. As MeadWestvaco’s vice president of global innovation, Alex Cedeno, put it,
“Online tools have come a long way and might be appropriate in some cases. However, one cannot replace the power of simultaneous dialogue and face-to-face, real-
time collaboration.” Cedeno said that MeadWestvaco’s innovation project teams are encouraged to work together in one place—an assigned “war room” equipped with state-of-the art video- and teleconference technology—for up to a day a week.
Recent research confirms the wisdom of MeadWestvaco’s tactic, finding that many important enablers of innovation, such as trust and shared tacit knowledge, occur
Online, while the quantity of engagements has gone up, the quality in terms of the depth of analysis, relevancy and qualification of content has often deteriorated.” R. Lemuel Lasher, Chief Innovation Officer, CSC
naturally in colocation.5 Successful globally integrated companies such as Citibank, HP, Hitachi, Novartis, Samsung and Siemens understand that web meetings,
videoconferencing and social media networks all have a role to play, but they do not
rely too much on those communication channels. Instead, they have generous travel budgets that allow for old-fashioned face-to-face meetings in single locations.6 R. Lemuel Lasher, chief innovation officer at CSC, an enterprise consultancy,
highlighted two measures of collaboration: quantity and quality. While technology
has increased the quantity of interactions, it has decreased the quality of engagement among those who use it to collaborate. “Online, the quality of thinking is pretty
shallow,” he noted. “Tweeting is shallow. The depth of analysis is deteriorating.” Part of the blame, Lasher said, lies with the multitasking made ubiquitous by mobile
web-based tools. “I can only focus on one thing at a time to do some quality thinking,” he added.
We have these new tools, but we’re still using the same organizational processes; we just slap technology on top of them. We must rethink our operations from the ground up.” Shubber Ali, Vice President of Strategic Innovation, Salesforce.com
5
Fit [continued] corporate members alcoa Raymond J. Kilmer, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Alcoa Technical Center
corning inc. Gary S. Calabrese, Senior Vice President, Corning Global Research Charles R. Craig, Senior Vice President, Science & Technology Administration &
Likewise, crowdsourcing tools can be excellent for ideation, when a company is in a
precompetitive stage with a new idea, but are not appropriate for gathering solutions to complex problems. Potential solvers need to be educated on all aspects of the problem, which generally means giving away some IP.
Salesforce.com’s Ali pointed to a larger mismatch—between the nonhierarchical
and fluid world that people experience online and the structure and operations of a large company. “We have these new tools,” he noted, “but we’re still using the same organizational processes; we just slap technology on top of them. We must rethink our operations from the ground up.”
Operations
csc R. Lemuel Lasher, Group President, Global Business Solutions Group; Chief Innovation Officer
meadwestvaco
Measurement
Alex Cedeno, Vice President of Global Innovation
salesforce.com Shubber Ali, Vice President of Strategic Innovation
siemens corporation Arturo Pizano, Manager, University Collaboration
DARDEN FACULTY LEADERS Sean D. Carr, Director of Intellectual Capital,
Are the new technologies actually increasing the kind of collaboration that
promotes innovation? “How do we measure success? How do we measure what we
know?” asked Darden’s Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat. “It’s very hard,” admitted Corning’s Calabrese. “What are my metrics that tell me I’m going in the right direction
by using these tools? People are looking at this website, but are they doing anything with it?”
Some companies have made efforts to track employees’ use of web-based technolo-
gies and to measure the value of the ideas they generate. But many questions remain about how best to assess the relationship between these tools and business performance.
Batten Institute Edward D. Hess, Professor of Business Administration, Batten Executive-in-Residence Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat, Assistant Professor of Business Administration Michael J. Lenox, Samuel L. Slover Research Professor of Business, Associate Dean and Executive Director of the Batten Institute Kathryn M. Sharpe, Assistant Professor of Business Administration Rajkumar “Raj” Venkatesan, Bank of America Research Associate Professor of Business Administration
6
Batten briefing innovators’ roundtable report
The ‘big data’ agenda is about improving our ability to foresee the future and gain insight about our customers, and so everyone is focused on accessing all this unstructured data and measuring everything. The problem is that all this data without the right analytic frameworks will not yield better insights. The agenda should not be ‘big data’ but ‘right analytics.’” R. Lemuel Lasher, Chief Innovation Officer, CSC
What Have We Learned? In 2006, Andrew McAfee wrote a groundbreaking paper in which he described a
new trend he dubbed “Enterprise 2.0.” Employees in a handful of forward-thinking organizations were engaging in collaborative activities on web-based social-media
platforms. As McAfee put it, “Wikis, blogs, group-messaging software and the like can make a corporate intranet into a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous peers—a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really
Innovators' roundtable The Innovators’ Roundtable is a membership network of senior innovation executives from some of the world’s most innovative companies. The purpose of the network is to share best practices, discuss common challenges and
gets done.”7
push the state of the art in corporate innova-
Today, social networks are becoming one of the primary computing environments
To encourage frank discussion and to motivate
for getting work done in a growing number of companies. They are replacing e-mail
tion in a highly interactive and candid forum. interdisciplinary learning, members are selected
for communication, collaboration and file sharing at work.
from among non-competing firms and diverse
If used right, social technologies can drive real value in organizations by making
center for research in entrepreneurship and
lems faster and be more productive. As one McKinsey study estimated, most of the
School of Business, convenes the Roundtable
industrial sectors. The Batten Institute, a leading
it easier for employees to find experts and share knowledge, and thus solve prob-
innovation at the University of Virginia’s Darden
value creation potential of social technologies lies in improving communication and
executives once or twice a year for conversa-
collaboration within and across organizations.8 In addition, by providing real-time information about markets and competitors, social media can boost companies’
intelligence-gathering efforts and help executives make better strategic decisions.9 However, social business applications are relatively new to most enterprises, and
tions facilitated by the world’s top scholars in innovation. Participating members have included Accenture, Alcoa, Corning, CSC, Bank of America, MeadWestvaco, Northrop Grumman, Salesforce.com and Siemens.
CIOs, CTOs and other executives are still learning how to incorporate them into
For further information about opportunities for
example, most are struggling to make sense of the flood of data generated from so-
batten@darden.virginia.edu.
their organizations. They also realize that the new tools create new challenges. For
membership, please contact:
cial networks. As McAfee put it, “[We] should never be naive enough to think that if we buy a bunch of social technologies and turn them on inside the organization, wonderful things are just spontaneously going to happen.”10
Looking Ahead Topics proposed for research initiatives and future meetings of the Innovators’ Roundtable include business model innovation, creating environments for
innovation, understanding the innovation value chain and managing innovation portfolios. The next Innovators’ Roundtable will be held in May 2013.
c o p y r i g h t i n f o r m at i o n BATTEN BRIEFINGS, February, 2013. Innovators’ Roundtable Report, published by the Batten Institute at the Darden School of Business, 100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA 22903. email: batten@darden.virginia.edu www.batteninstitute.org ©2013 The Darden School Foundation. All rights reserved.
7
Essential Reading citations 1
McAfee, A. 2011. “Conversations with Industry Innova-
tors.” IBM Video Transcript. ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/ software/lotus/info/social/collaboration/IBM_Conversations_with_Industry_Innovators_Video_Transcript_ Andy_McAfee.pdf (Accessed 30 November, 2012.) 2
Yard. B. 2012. “7 Lessons from Social Business Lead-
ers.” InformationWeek. http://www.informationweek. com/thebrainyard/news/social_networking_private_ platforms/240012640/7-lessons-from-social-businessleaders (Accessed 30 November, 2012.) 3
Carr, D.F. 2012. “Asana Offers Inbox Just For Work.”
InformationWeek. http://www.informationweek.com/ thebrainyard/news/240002825/asana-offers-inbox-justfor-work (Accessed 30 November, 2012.) 4
Carr, D.F. 2012. “Sparqlight Bets Social Workflow Beats
‘Social Voyeurism.’ ” InformationWeek. http://www. informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/232901641/ sparqlight-bets-social-workflow-beats-social-voyeurism (Accessed 30 November, 2012.) 5
Wilson, K., and Yves L. Doz. 2012. “10 Rules for
Managing Global Innovation.” Harvard Business Review. 90 (10): 84-90. 6
Ibid.
7
McAfee, A. 2006. “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emer-
gent Collaboration.” MIT Sloan Management Review. 47 (3): 21-28. 8
Bughin, J. et al. 2012. “Capturing Business Value with
Social Technologies.” McKinsey Quarterly. (4):72-80. 9
Harrysson, M. et al. 2012. “How ‘Social Intelligence’
Can Guide Decisions.” McKinsey Quarterly. (4):81-89. 10
McAfee, A. 2011. “Conversations with Industry In-
novators.” IBM Video Transcript. ftp://public.dhe.ibm. com/software/lotus/info/social/collaboration/IBM_Conversations_with_Industry_Innovators_Video_Transcript_ Andy_McAfee.pdf (Accessed 30 November, 2012.)
8
Batten briefing innovators’ roundtable report
“10 Rules for Managing Global Innovation.” Keeley Wilson and Yves L. Doz. 2012. Harvard Business Review. 90 (10): 84-90.
“Capturing Business Value with Social Technologies.” 2012. Jacques Bughin et al. McKinsey Quarterly. (4): 72-80.
“Democratizing Strategy: How Crowdsourcing Can Be Used for Strategy Dialogues.” 2012. Florian Ladstaetter-Fussenegger et al. California Management Review. 54 (4): 44-68.
The Connected Company. Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal. 2012. O’Reilly Media. Sebastopol, CA.
Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. Andrew McAfee. 2009. Harvard Business School Press. Boston, MA.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Charlene Li. 2008. Harvard Business School Press. Boston, MA.
“How Open Innovation Can Help You Cope in Lean Times.” 2009. Henry W.
Chesbrough and Andrew R. Garman. Harvard Business Review. 87 (12): 68-76. “How ‘Social Intelligence’ Can Guide Decisions.” Martin Harrysson et al. 2012. McKinsey Quarterly. (4): 81-89.
Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead. Charlene Li. 2010. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA.
Social Business by Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company. Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim. 2012. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA.
“The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies.” Michael Chui et. al. 2012. McKinsey Global Institute.
The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees. Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald. 2011. Harvard Business School Press. Boston, MA.