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For years, I used to say, “When technology can stop the family argument cold by injecting fact into endless debates, we will be in IT nirvana.”  For example, my brothers and I around a dinner table could go ten rounds arguing over something stupid, like the date of Galileo’s birth, when all we had to do was get up from the table and consult an encyclopedia.  But no, instead, we would sit there pontificating over what we each thought had to be the correct date.

Well tonight, I loaded my Google Mobile Application app onto my iPhone 3G and SPOKE these words:  “When was Galileo Born?”  And LO!  It understood my voice perfectly and returned a web site entry:  Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa Italy on February 15th, 1564.

End of argument.  End of history.  IT has achieved the limit of my imagination, and now I guess I’ll have to focus on life science. 

Thinking big doesn’t mean spending big.  In tough times like today, most companies - most people - do exactly the wrong thing.  They slow decision-making but don’t change the size of the bets they are making.  The winners on the other side - trust me - will be the ones who reduced the size and duration of new initiatives but either kept the same decision-making pace or even accelerated it.

It’s natural to want to be cautious in times like these.  But when you place the caution on the side of the size of the amount of money and time you will give to try new ideas, you can capture opportunities that others are now too slow to spot.

When I think that all the email and phone messages are just getting to be too much, and my mouse starts to creep toward the ‘delete all’ button on my inbox, I remember Nick Donofrio.

Nick, who retired last month as Executive Vice President at IBM - and one of the last of the old-guard protectors of young innovators at the company - was one of the busiest people on earth.  A huge part of 400 thousand people at an $80 Billion company relied on his leadership every day.

And yet, never in all the time I’ve known him has he failed to reply within 24 hours to my email or phone call PERSONALLY (not via admin, though Barbara Storck was a genius in her own right).  I did a straw poll of others, and they all reported the same thing.  If everyone has a super power, Nick’s was magical responsiveness.  (It probably helped that he could compress the full content of a 2 hour meeting into 15 minutes most of the time…so maybe he actually had more bandwidth than most of us slogging through inane, endless, back-to-back meetings.)

And it occurs to me that of all the complaints people have about dealing with big companies, responsiveness is at the heart of it.  Big companies are full of well-meaning people who want so badly to be of use that they promise to do things, to call you back right away, or at least to send you an email, but in the end there is silence, non-responsiveness.  These are people of high personal integrity forced by the system and inefficiency into low professional integrity.  (Professional integrity is all about being responsive and doing what you promise - or at least saying you can’t do what you promised before the deadline.)  Most of the time, people are so harried, they don’t even remember all those small daily promises made, and email inboxes become so crammed that even one’s admin can’t parse through it all.

So put a stop to those endless meetings.  Refuse to attend 90% of them unless they are under 20 minutes.  And answer that email…even if it is just a one line note that says, “Super busy right now…can you ping me again on Friday?”

Hey, if Nick could do it, so can we.

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Nick Donofrio, Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology, will retire on October 1, 2008, after an IBM career of 44 years. Nick joined the company in 1964 as a co-op, and proceeded to build a rich career of technology leadership. His broad portfolio of responsibilities and his strong personal relationships with leaders in business, government and academia all over the world are testament to the breadth of his impact. Nick has truly been IBM’s Mr. Innovation–not only as the leader of our global technology strategy, but also as the conscience for much of our societal and policy-related efforts, especially in the area of career opportunities for minorities and women. He has inspired tens of thousands of IBMers with his boundless energy, bottomless curiosity, and unfailing optimism.

While I would love to get feedback on my story at this year’s BIF, if you only have time for one video, watch Cat Lainè’s speech on AIDG’s efforts to create and fund entrepreneurial teams around the world that solve problems for people in need.  It is a must-see presentation, and we should all do what we can to help AIDG succeed.  Click here for a link to all the stories, including Tony Hsieh from Zappos and John Abele from Boston Scientific and the Grunion Expedition.

As regular readers know, I’m fascinated with the problem in open innovation of sharing intentions.  Inventions - those we can share.  Patents, NDAs - all about sharing ‘intellectual property’ mainly in the form of inventions. 

But believing that sharing inventions is sufficient for innovation is like thinking that you can make proper sentences using only nouns.

The trouble with sharing intentions is that they are slippery, and you can’t protect them. Once people know what you intend to do, they can capture the opportunity for themselves or thwart your plans with impunity.   

Recently, I was reading David Ignatius’s Body of Lies, and he quotes Lord Ismay (1953):

To mystify and mislead the enemy has always been one of the cardinal principles of war.  Consequently, ruses de guerre have played a part in almost every campaign since the Trojan Horse.  The game has been played for so long that it is not easy to think out new methods of disguising one’s strengths or one’s intentions. 

Business-as-warfare is such a dominant notion that perhaps it is no wonder we have many ways to conceal our intentions but few ways to share them; many ways to mislead others, but few mature ways to work together across company lines.

In “ It’s Alive,” authors Chris Meyer of Monitor Networks and Stan Davis of Monitor Talent make the argument:

 Business leaders face an imperative to create organizations that can adapt continually and rapidly, to keep pace with shifts in their markets, technologies, and society itself.          

Now first of all, any company that has dedicated units devoted to networks and talent has my vote.  

And it seems to me that organizations which can continuously adapt to change over the long-haul, especially mid-size companies, must know how to find entrepreneurial talent, empower them, and then NOT spend too much time or money giving them opportunities to prove new directions.  

This is essentially the philosophy of Team upStart:  1) Focus on talent; 2) Never give a team more than 10 weeks to prove a new business; 3) Form teams as proto-companies, mentor them, but let them run themselves.

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.]

 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.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Click here for entry #17.]

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.

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!