Shared Secrets – Entry #17: Tools

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

With collaborative business innovation accelerating, automation tools, formal standards and innovative sharing regimes are springing up everywhere.  Informal communities of trust continue to serve us well, but if there is a way to increase efficiency and reduce the occurrence of inappropriate leaks and missed opportunities – ‘ships passing in the fog’ – then it is worth the effort in this economic environment to try them.

To date, formalizing knowledge management and innovation practices has a dubious history.  As one observer put it, “Innovation tends to disappear when you look straight at it.”  The level of complexity involved in trying to manage innovation even in a single firm can be overwhelming.  Trying to collaborate across companies on top of this is so insurmountably difficult that it is amazing it happens at all.  While stories of open innovation are few, stories of failed collaborations are many.  Consequently, the market for collaboration tools has focused heavily on the low hanging fruit:

a) Solutions deployed strictly inside a single company;

b) Public crowdsourcing solutions.

The necessary next step is an integrated solution that allows the management and tracking of all nine sharing options through a single portal.  Companies like Palo Alto-based Tacit, which have already deployed knowledge management solutions inside many companies and are now deploying public solutions like Illumio, are in a good position to bridge the gap and cover the middle ground of external-but-private sharing.

Illumio, in particular, deserves mentioning, because it addresses at least one of the unsolvable problems of collaborative innovation – knowing whether someone else has useful knowledge before you reveal yourself to them.  The Illumio idea is to create a community of free agents who have willingly indexed their personal hard drives and made the information searchable to anyone else who also has the Illumio software.  Users type questions into a Google-like field, and Illumio, via the internet, uses its index from everyone else’s computers to determine who might have relevant information.  It then ranks candidates and sends a private message to each asking if they would like to answer the question.  Only those who say yes are then revealed to the person asking the question.  Illumio says that participants’ hard drive information is only used to point someone with a question to someone who might have the answer, and that the actual information is never directly exposed to anyone else.

This can work well in a world of free-agents, particularly among the privacy-deprived generation who are growing up using community sites like MySpace.com and peer-to-peer systems like Skype.  However, employees of most companies will not likely be allowed to put Illumio on their corporate computers any time soon.  This is a notable gap, because many of the experts one would hope to connect with already work for someone else who would not allow participation in such a public system.  Tacit’s corporate solution does much the same thing Illumio does, only within single companies.  Finding a way to bridge Tacit’s internal corporate systems to Illumio’s crowdsourcing public system could lead to greater collaborative business opportunities for companies.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Tune in tomorrow for more Shared Secrets.]

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