Shared Secrets – Entry #15: Cat O Nine Tails

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

As the trend toward collaborative business innovation intensifies in most industries, informal methods become problematic.  Relying solely on informal methods for sharing intent means managers must wait for serendipity and hope that chance connections do not result in catastrophic exposure of unprotected information.  The lack of common practice makes the entire affair inefficient, risky and slow when the intensity around sharing increases.

A company that has a good handle on its intentions is already in better shape to deal with these problems than most.  Intentions that are tracked can be managed and routed.  Decisions can be made about which intentions will be shared and in what ways.  But most importantly, managers that have a handle on emerging intentions can operate at a finer level of granularity, choosing to share elements rather than whole intentions.  A manager can authorize employees to share openly a specific technical gap while keeping the actual goals of the intention internal until specific opportunities present themselves.

Managers and individual champions also can utilize more channel options for how different intentions are shared.  Today there is an all-or-nothing attitude in many organizations toward sharing unprotected information: share with no one outside or put it on a web site for everyone to see.  Managing an intention well requires being able to decide between the following nine options for any element of an intention:

For the individual champion:

•    Keep it to myself privately
•    Share it with a select group of people inside the firm
•    Share it with my manager

For the champion in concert with management

•    Share it with select executives
•    Share it with everyone in firm
•    Share it with external advisors (Board, consultants, intermediaries)
•    Share it with select external organizations with whom we have a sharing agreement
•    Share it with select organizations with whom we don’t have a formal agreement
•    Share it publicly (via crowdsourcing systems, web sites, the press, etc)

In this way, a firm can decide to share an intention’s technical gap publicly on the web but only share its identity, the specific opportunity, and its level of dedication toward capturing it with specific external organizations.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Click here for Entry #16.]

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