Shared Secrets – Entry #16: We Should Have Brought The Interns
This is the fifteenth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series
A summit was held recently between the senior research managers of a semiconductor firm and a biotech company to see if there were opportunities to collaborate. After a day of canned powerpoint presentations and vague discussions about already well-publicized research projects, there was a brainstorming session that went something like this:
“We’re looking into nanotechnology. Are you doing anything in that?”
“No, we aren’t working on nanotechnology, but we have a project on the role of cytokines in oncology. Do you have anything in that?”
Seeing that the two groups were unwilling to engage each other beyond reciting general topics of interest, one frustrated attendee turned to a colleague and said, “We brought the wrong people. We should have sent the interns.”
His point is a good one. The mid-level research managers and executives had a lot of things working against them when it came to sharing intent. If a senior executive indicated a direction, it would have been taken by the other company as a signal of an imminent market play. If instead the companies had trained junior employees in common standards for sharing intent, they could have had a much more open dialogue; emerging intentions articulated by an intern are less likely to be taken as a signal of an imminent market play.
Sophisticated organizations team-up low-level employees with senior executives whenever summits with outside firms are called. This was a notable feature of collaborative work on Java even after it matured into a strategic platform with executive support.
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[Click here for entry #17.]
Prosperity in Time
It’s official – or soon to be – we are either in a global recession or possibly something worse. Money is tight, and it is likely to get tighter. Jobs are scarce, and the chances of getting a new job are going to get slimmer – even for the highly educated. This isn’t the late 90′s, when time and talent were so tight that a burger flipper could get recruited as the CEO of a venture-backed startup.
That’s the bad news.
And there isn’t a lot of good news….except this.
As money becomes tight, and as high-paying jobs become scarce, time returns as the key unit of investment in new growth. It has always been true that growth is driven by people with different knowhow coming together and creating new value. During periods of economic prosperity, convincing people with knowhow to spend their time takes a lot of money. They don’t really need that money to live. They need it because…well, because it’s what they think their knowhow is worth at that time. Hence, we talk about needing $2-$4 million for startups that require virtually zero tangible resources. Beyond paying for expensive talent, why exactly does a Web 2.0 startup need $4 million bucks?
Four weeks ago, a team that thought it needed $2 million to start their business now needs…practically nothing. The team is young and can live with Mom. And now they can convince friends with skills to forget about finding another job, live together cheaply, and build their dream. Instead of offering options and six-figure salaries, they can offer a shared wifi hub, the spare room, and all the ramen you can eat.
I don’t want to be a Pollyanna, but it seems to me that if hard times make people remember that it is ok to need each other, and if they make us more willing to invest our time in each other, then the bad times ahead will turn out to be better than the ‘good times’ past.
Forbidden City – the Massively Multiperson Online Experience
Oh this is really too cool: My favorite development team at IBM just finished building the first online virtual world of the Chinese Forbidden City.
When I signed on, there were 150 thousand users. The environment allows people to experience the Forbidden City in all its 3D spendor at different times in its history.
It’s a tour, but it is also a social experience, allowing everyone in the virtual world to interact with each other. (Now all I need is an instant Chinese-English translation plugin for the chat window.)
John Tolva and team – you’ve been busy!
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.
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[Click here for Entry #16.]
From Australia with Love
We interrupt the series on ‘managing collaborative innovation’ to showcase the following quote in Australia’s most recent government review of their ‘innovation system.’ Yeah, don’t ask me why they insist on calling it a system. A lot of my friends down there think it’s an absurd way to characterize things, too. Still, they did mention the value of the intermediated approach to open innovation:
“Australia’s innovation policy needs to balance investment
in increasing the supply of knowledge from science
and research with increasing the capacity of Australian
enterprises to receive, absorb and take up such knowledge.
An example of this flows from the asymmetry of knowledge.
It is not uncommon that two firms could enhance their joint
value by combining their ideas and information but do not do
so either because they are not aware of the other’s knowledge,
or the risk involved in revealing their own information to
another party is too great. This can be overcome through
the use, for example, of trusted intermediaries, a concept
that grew out of the open innovation work in the US (brought to
Australia through the InnovationXchange). The
practice is now being exported to other parts of the world
in a broadening network of genuine operational innovation.
Exposing more firms to this sort of service, and mindset, could
have significant value for the nation as well as the firms.”
(http://www.innovation.gov.au/innovationreview/Pages/home.aspx)
Shared Secrets – Entry #14: The Virtuous Rumor Mill
This is the fourteenth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series
Another important aspect of the Silicon Valley rumor mill is that it lays down a set of unspoken rules that serve to maintain credibility in spite of changing intentions. Emerging intentions are subject to a high degree of change. All the business innovation examples in this article involved change from what the champions originally thought their intentions were to what they became in the end. An intention circulating through the rumor mill tags it to the original champions – for later use when claiming credit – while implicitly embracing the likelihood that either nothing will come of it or that the champions will go in a completely different direction without notice. In a market play, the public does not take kindly to companies that introduce offerings only to withdraw them shortly afterwards or that frequently go off in tangents.
What this shows is that a community of trust, using powerful but largely unwritten cues and standards of conduct, can at least partially overcome the three ‘unsolvable’ problems of collaborative business innovation. In the Adobe case, the community brought Jobs, Warnock and Geshke together, because there was a shared sense that they could help each other. This overcame the typical problem many firms have of needing signed non-disclosure agreements up-front but not knowing enough about each other in advance to warrant the effort. Most of the secrets were already out in the open, and yet only as unofficial ‘whispers.’ The community also helped ensure that those with the ideas – Warnock and Geschke in this case – got credit for them by keeping track of sources through the rumor mill. This is slightly more formalized in open source software communities, but the principal is the same. And whether they consciously realized it or not, Warnock and Geschke were protected by the community of trust, which helped reduce the chance that Jobs’ benevolent intentions would reverse after being exposed to the details of Adobe’s internal information.
This works in the Bay Area and other communities, which have traditionally been defined geographically. It also highlights one perspective on why we sometimes run into trouble when sharing between communities of trust, such as a Bay Area firm that wishes to explore partnerships in China. The curbing power of social consequences is similar to gravity. It drops off dramatically with distance. If the arbiters of social (and economic) consequence are not shared, the parties must fall back on the inefficiencies of legal methods. The good news long term is that, of course, the world is getting smaller, and global communities of trust are springing up. Use of online communities backed by global players can socialize ideas while ensuring that everyone knows where those ideas came from.
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Shared Secrets – Entry #13: Public Trust
This is the thirteenth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series
Leaking intentions privately to individual advisors or small cadres like one’s consultants or Board can sometimes be more dangerous than sharing them openly. Executive Board members are notoriously loose-lipped within their personal networks. It is partly what one looks for in a Board member. On one hand, we want them to keep our secrets. On the other, we want them to tell people they trust about what we want to do. But the problem with this is three-fold. First, this limits the set of intentions only to those where senior executives are champions or advocates, and Harvard’s Clayton Christensen has well argued that this set of intentions is inevitably watered down from sources toward the middle and bottom of the org chart. Second, if the Board member errs and confides privately in someone who then uses the information to move against you, you may never know until it is too late. Third, if only a small cadre know that the intention is yours, then if someone else appropriates the information and makes a move in the market first, the public will generally believe that it was their idea, not yours.
A lot of people knowing your intentions can be a better move. I made the point earlier that if Steve Jobs had intended, he could have taken the general idea of PostScript from Adobe and made his own independent solution without them. But he didn’t. Did Adobe’s Warnock and Geschke just get lucky? Not exactly. By the time Steve Jobs met with Adobe there was a large community in the Bay Area who mutually knew and supported both Steve and the Adobe team. As the record of email between Bay Area computer enthusiasts at the time has shown, many people in the community knew generally what Adobe’s intentions were. Making off with their ideas would have had negative consequences in the community of support that Jobs now relied upon. Even if he had decided after seeing Adobe’s technology that the right strategy for Apple was to appropriate it or re-invent it on his own, he would have had to find a way to make good for Warnock and Geschke.
The community of trust, not Adobe’s intellectual property, helped ensure fair play. In the end, Jobs not only collaborated with Adobe, he bought 5% of the company as part of a partnership deal that gave the budding firm a strategic leg-up and improved its appearance for future financing rounds. Perhaps Silicon Valley should be seen not simply as a venture capital led knowledge-brokering network as some have suggested, but rather as a community that uses social consequences to impose constraints on what people do with information that is openly shared. In this view, venture capitalists are not just knowledge-brokers. They are more importantly a key arbiter of fair use. If your company is funded (or seeks funding) by any member of the tight-knit VC community and you use others’ knowledge in a way that the greater community feels is inappropriate, you are likely angering people whose VCs know your VCs. For this to work, though, the greater community must know what your intentions are – or at least the rumor mill must be circulating them. No wonder so many hybrid business models from eBay to Google come out of Silicon Valley and choose to suffer the incredible cost of maintaining headquarters there.
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