Shared Secrets – Entry #5: Crossing the Border

This is the fifth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series

Despite its risks, collaborative business model innovation is all about sharing intentions with outsiders. We do this to fill gaps, create win-win opportunities and shape emerging intentions into something more than we would have imagined on our own. But we also risk harmful exposure. It is a delicate game, and historic forces are opening it to a wider range of managers and personnel than ever before.

Increased worker mobility, decreased corporate loyalty, and community systems that cross company borders (such as Skype, MSN, and Wikipedia) make it more likely than ever that your deepest inner secrets are going to show up on someone’s internet blog before you have written them down for yourself. In this environment, executives, management and staff need a common framework for knowing when and how to share emerging intentions with outsiders. This is not to stop the flow of knowledge to the outside – that would be like putting a finger in a cracking dam – but to control it and take the most advantage from the inevitable.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Click here for entry #6]

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