“If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got” – Albert Einstein.
What a year it has been! Learnt many valuable lessons & continuing to learn many more lessons 🙂 Life is a great teacher and I hope I’ll remain being a sincere student. Amongst the several changes that came my way, starting Ideapoke and taking the responsibility of a Growth Hacker was clearly the boldest professional move I had ever yet ventured in. At Ideapoke we envisioned providing Innovation-As-A-Service and creating a platform that acts as a marketplace for ideas!
One of the reasons it took a long time to get back to blogging on my personal page because I was busy blogging on our Ideapoke website. I thought I’ll begin with first sharing the posts I’d written and in the meantime write more fresh new content.
Not so long ago, I’d blogged on the building blocks of open innovation and implicitly binding the various aspects is – Internal Collaboration. We live in a highly networked world and a knowledge-based economy; counter-productive in such a scenario would be people working in silos, unaware or unwilling to share knowledge and ideas.
For decades now, researchers as well as industrialists have echoed the sentiment that collaboration would change the very DNA of corporate culture and management in a company, thereby impacting profitability and sustainability. The collaboration of a cross-functional team (For example- marketing, sales, product development, finance and HR) could potentially open up multiple new ventures and initiatives.
The OECD (2005) report clearly shows the correlation between internal collaborations in the company to its partnerships and willingness to work with numerous external partners. It isn’t enough having knowledge freely available in the market. A firm needs resources and capabilities to use this knowledge, and the resource and capabilities can be built by internal collaboration.
There are several tangible benefits to internal collaboration – knowledge sharing, risk mitigation, cost reduction and faster speed to product development, process development & go to market. This doesn’t mean we offset or ignore any threats or possible disadvantages of internal collaboration – the blatantly visible – harmonizing different viewpoints and ideas collected.
Internal collaboration isn’t only about increasing productivity inside the organization; it enables mechanisms to cope with external collaborations. In fact the need of internal collaboration is the drive behind the current 4.77B$ to the estimated 8.19B$ market of Enterprise Social Software and Internal Collaborations platforms (Source: ReportsnReports.com). The fundamental reason for such an explosive growth and central theme is the ability to offer a systems approach (incorporating people, processes and technology) to a given problem. It takes the mindset that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of parts’.
We’re moving to a world where internal collaboration is innovating itself. In fact, the world is looking for platforms and solutions, which can deliver a marketplace of ideas and execute them. In the coming posts I hope we will engage collaborate and connect to understand this better.
