The company’s knowledge at your fingertips

Last week I was at an Open Innovation session in Amsterdam discussing how to organize innovation in your company other than by depending on serendipity. How do you go about organizing an agile and up-to-date portfolio for your company? How do you ensure optimal use of your company’s intellectual resources?

The subject has been on my mind for quite a while now, having had the opportunity to work on product information and innovation for several clients over the last years. Information and communication is at the heart of the problem. You have to listen very carefully the your consumer, customer, competitor, supplier, or basically the outside world forces as defined by Porter. Listening to, observing, communicating with and learning from all these forces helps you understand what changes in your portfolio are needed.

But when you do listen, you need to be able to follow up. You need to organize follow-up through integration in your standard way of working. Combining multiple sources and reusing them as input for the definition of your products and subsequent marketing processes. Having to create your message only once.

And that is where technology can lend a hand. Managing multiple information sources is something the entire 2.0-movement is very good at. Mashing up content, zipping and splitting (including translation, localization) and multichannel publishing. It’s all in there. So this is where I look for my solutions. And I was not alone!

The meeting on ‘Innovation with Knowledge’ (free after the Dutch ‘ Innoveren met Kennis’) was organized a colleague of mine, Ruud Böhmer. It is part of a returning program on the subject where innovation managers, knowledge managers and CIOs come together and discuss the possibilities of innovation and how to organize this using the full knowledge base of your company.

The idea is to find solutions for ‘innovation with knowledge’ through open innovation. A very 2.0-concept, where you all come together, share your knowledge on a subject and try to find a way forward. And learn, I did. The most memorable quote was for Graham Cross, director collaborative innovation at Unilever: “Did you know that 90% of all innovation is happing in small companies, somewhere out there! Do you know of them, do you work with them?” Well, do you?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 13:16 and is filed under Enterprise 2.0, collaboration, content management, information value, knowledge management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.