Soft Skills

Evolving collaboration

Arun Seth writes how organizations are making efforts to make innovation a more open and collaborative process

Arun Seth

‘The Catalogue of Life’ (April 2007, http://www.catalogueoflife.org) is an impressive example of collaboration.

Since 2001, more than 3,000 specialists from all over the world have been working together to classify the Earth’s different life forms.

This edition lists more than a million species—reckoned to be about half of those known to us today. Homo sapiens is among them, of course. You’ll find us six levels deep in the classification, alongside the other primates in the class of mammals.

Disappointingly, our entry looks just like all the others—a simple statement of our position in the order of things and our geographic distribution. You have to look elsewhere to find out what makes us different. And when you do, one thing stands out—the way we develop and use tools to extend our natural capabilities.

A social species

Take communication and collaboration, for example. Humans are a social species. We love to communicate and have developed all sorts of ways to work with others to achieve things we can’t do on our own. Businesses are just one example.

For thousands of years, though, our natural abilities limited what we could do. Talking to people in your own neighbourhood was easy, but communicating with those further afield was full of difficulty. You had two options: deliver your message in person or get someone else to deliver it for you. Both were slow and time consuming—a real barrier to getting things done.

Then along came the telegraph and, more importantly, the phone. Suddenly, much more became possible. The phone, for example, made it much easier for a head office to coordinate the efforts of teams in different factories and offices. In doing so, it paved the way for the multinational, multisite, organizations we’re familiar with today.

Other innovations had a similar impact. By eliminating postal delays, the fax increased the pace of business. And by making it easier for people in an organization to share customer records and other data, computers and data networks enabled new working practices that were much more efficient.

But these advances were quite minor compared to those we’re seeing today. Based on the Internet and a whole raft of related technologies, they’re enabling levels of communication and collaboration that were inconceivable only a few years ago.

Communication and collaboration

Online directories and search engines are helping organizations find others to work with. Conferencing tools are speeding negotiations. Web services and services-oriented architectures are making it easy to connect IT systems. And the use of Web 2.0 social networking software—wikis, blogs, mashups and so on—is facilitating interaction, cooperation and collaborative innovation.

And more and more these days, things work to a common set of standards. This is making it easier to connect technologies and systems together—even when you’re talking about different organizations that use products from different vendors. And it doesn’t take long to do it. It isn’t a case of ‘plug and play’ just yet, but we’re getting close.

The advances are ‘turbocharging’ people’s ability to work together. According to Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the result will be collaborations of a scale and pace far beyond what we’ve seen before.

They highlight the completely new ways of working together that are being created, allowing collaborative innovation to be extended from the realm of idea generation and product development to the very essence of doing business. In ‘The New Principles of a Swarm Business’, Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper, (MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2007, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2007/sprin-g/12/) say: “Groups of humans swarming together for a common purpose … unleashes tremendous creativity, spurring exciting and valuable innovations.” You only have to look at websites like Wikipedia to see the results!

So now that global networks and new software technologies have removed many of the limits to collaboration, just how collaborative will you dare to be? The choice is yours.

Some are already seizing the opportunities. Take Chinese company Li & Fung, for example. It puts together highly-customized supply chains to design, make and distribute clothes for retailers around the world.

Li & Fung works with 10,000 partners across 40 countries, bringing together the best combination for each individual item. The set of partners that produces and delivers a high-end wool sweater, for example, would be completely different to that used to supply synthetic fiber men’s trousers. The scope of this collaboration is extraordinary, and is only really possible because of the company’s effective use of technology.

Others—BT among them—are embracing the new opportunities to make innovation a more open and collaborative process. Customers are invited to try out beta versions of new tools and technologies and provide feedback to help shape what’s eventually offered to market.

But these examples are just the start. The technology may now exist to support much more extensive levels of collaboration, but people are only beginning to discover its potential and many organizations still have to put in place the infrastructure that’s necessary to support it.

As converged voice and data networks become the norm and tools that enable collaboration are increasingly built in to the IT systems we all use at work, you can be sure of one thing. The human race will become even more capable than before, and will be benefiting significantly as a result.

Arun Seth is Chairman and Managing Director, BT India