Social Innovation

How will your organization find its next great idea?

Matt May invited me to test a new idea management and collaboration tool for groups - Kindling. If you want an invitation, please visit his blog, and leave a comment, Matt is inviting 100 people for 1 month trial.

I was bloging earlier about how similar tool is used by DELL to capture and rank customer requirements - to really listen to the voice of the customer.

Kindling to my understanding works similarly, and let's see what comes out of this experiment.

There's a good presentation in SlideShare about the dynamics of social suggeston box. There seems to be many of these tools available. Should you consider using one in your organization?



Photo by atomicShed

Management's new role?

This questions was printed on HBR when I was born:

What are the big tasks waiting for management today that require both new theories and new practices?

Maybe the time is finally right for lasting answers. In May Gary Hamel and HBR invited 35 really smart folks to reinvent management for the 21st century.

They focused on the following key questions during their meeting:

1. What are the deep-seated impediments, or “design flaws,” that limit the capacity of organizations to adapt (to change without trauma); to innovate (to mobilize the imagination of everyone, every day); and to engage (to create environments that inspire extraordinary contributions).
2. Given these systemic impediments, and the new demands that will confront organizations in the years ahead, what should be the agenda for 21st century management innovators? That is, what are the “moonshot challenges” that must be addressed if we are to create organizations that are truly fit for the future?
3. Can we imagine, even in outline form, some potential solutions to these challenges, and if so, what sorts of experiments might be useful in helping us to test these ideas in real world settings?
4. More generally, what could be done to help accelerate the evolution of management in the years to come, that is, what is it that limits the pace of management innovation and how might these limits by overcome?

I am curios to hear the outcome of this discussion in his blog.

Similar topics have been discussed for quite a while. Peter F. Drucker wrote in Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1969 about

Management's new role

"We will, therefore, increasingly have to learn to make existing organizations capable of rapid and continuing innovation. How far we are from this is shown by the fact that management still worries about resistance to change."

He outlined 5 new realities (for Reinventing Management for the 1970s...)

1. All institutions, including business, are accountable for the quality of life
2. Entrepreneutial innovation will become the very heart and core of management
3. It is management's task to make knowledge more productive
4. Management will have to been considered as both a "science" and a "humanity"
5. Economic and social development are the result of management

This he said in a keynote speach "at the 15th CIOS International Management Congress in Tokyo, Japan, November 7, 1969".

I can not find the article online, but I can send a pdf copy to anyone who is interested - just send me an email.

The questions have been around, maybe the time is finally right for lasting answers?

Ideas Come from Customers

Peter Drucker and Elisabeth Haas Edersheim point out the importance of knowledge management in their book The Definitive Drucker

Delivering value depends on your listening and translating of customer needs, and innovating accordingly.

My friend told me about this great tool of exchanging ideas with your customers. It’s a tool created by Salesforce.com. They are naturally using their own tool on their website and openly asking their customers to comment their products and propose new features.

The tool was recently featured in BusinessWeek which wrote a story about how Starbucks and Dell use the tool. Dell for example has received thousands of ideas and tens of thousands of comments. (Starbucks requires user account , Salesfoce.com ideas was down or closed during weekend...)

The tool also allows customers and employees to rate the proposals to let the companies know, which are the best ones and should be worked on. Naturally it could be used only internally, if for example capturing customer needs in the web would open a door to your competitors.

Simple and effective. This tool really allows you to capture true customer requirements and ensure customer focus. And eliminate the distance between R&D and customer. It is really hard to think of a more effective and simple way than Salesforce.com Ideas.

How often have your R&D said they are too far from the customer?

How effectively do you collect customer requirements?

How effectively do you deliver them within your organization?

Would you have the courage to be as open as Salesforce.com?


Actually, I proposed this tool internally a year ago. Ideas are appreciated in our company, but I still felt like Bob on this little promotional video by Salesforce.com

To whom should I present this idea, and
how do they know if it a good one?

Have you ever felt like Bob?

The suggestion box in Bob's office looks suprizingly similar to the one shown on my earlier post Ideas Come from Everywhere

Knowledge Management Theory and Practice

Last week I heard a presentation about knowledge management, which got me thinking

What is the theory and practice of Knowledge Management?

Year ago I thought Nonaka's Knowledge Creating Company provided the best answer with SECI model:

Socialization: the sharing of tacit knowledge between individuals through joint activities, physical proximity. (Must happen before I post to this blog)

Externalization: the expression of tacit knowledge in publicly comprehensible forms. (Happens as I post to this blog)

Combination: the conversion of explicit knowledge into more complex sets of explicit knowledge: communication, dissemination, systematization of explicit knowledge. (Happens also as I post to this blog, and as you read this blog)

Internalization: the conversion of externalized knowledge into tacit knowledge on an individual or organizational scale. Applying the explicit knowledge into actions, practices, processes and strategic initiatives. (Must happen at the same time as posting to this blog, otherwise learning by doing does not take place)

I was no longer sure if this SECI model is valid at the age of blogging. So I started looking for the theory and practice and found them from unexpected sources.

A friend of mine actually just made his PhD on "Exploring and Exploiting Knowledge". Yes, it is academic, but provides good overview of Knowledge Management theory. (You can download the 191 page pdf, 1,8 Mb here)

In my search of simplicity, I will use one of the definitions Era (Dr. Mäki to you) identified:

"Knowledge management is a process of knowledge creation, validation, presentation, distribution, and application. These five phases in knowledge management allow an organization to learn and reflect as well as unlearn and relearn, which are usually considered essential for the building, maintaining, and replenishing of core-competencies." (Bhatt, 2001)

As unexpectidly I found a perfect example of practice at SlideShare. Meet Jessica and her Web 2.0 based Knowledge Management system:

| View | Upload your own

Studying a bit further, I found an abstract of an article I have no access to stating:

"Now, after 15 years Web 2.0 concepts seem to be an ideal fit with Nonaka's SECI approach opening new doors for more personal, dynamic, and social learning on a global scale by combination of formal and informal learning, knowledge management, and Web 2.0 concepts into one integrated solution.”

This actually proves that Nonaka’s model is still very valid. But I am still missing a good book about the topic.

Do you know any good business book about Knowledge Management?
One that you would recommend me - by commenting below or by email?

Do you have a Knowledge Management system?

How is knowledge created at your organization?

How is knowledge validated at your organization?

How is knowledge presented at your organization?

How is knowledge distributed at your organization?

How is knowledge applied at your organization?

Is there something you could learn from Jessica?

Another year has passed

A year has passed since I decided to start this blog. A year ago I though of this as a project, but it was not. It's a hobby. A year ago I was thinking of making a project plan for this blog, but how could I do a project plan for a hobby? And that's what has been taking all this time.

But I have not forgotten the idea. How could I forget a hobby?

Actually, this was just another year that passed. The hobby started around April 8, 1997 when a made a summary of Nonaka's article The Knowledge-Creating Company in Harvard Business Review. Since then I have been collecting these best practices. For some years now I have been planning to put them on paper. I decided to document them here virtually instead. They are usefull in my work, and I am more than happy if somebody else finds them usefull in his/her work also.

I am not worried at all about the slowness of the start. During this year I have collected more best practices and this week I finally realized how all the pieces fit togehter. Besides, one of my favorite novelist, Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness says

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

I may have been slow, but I have had my sensors out and I remember more of what I have read. My concious became clean when I realized this is part of my life long learning - not a project, and thus there is no schedule and there are no dead lines!

Nevertheless I intend to post more frequently in the future.