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"In this on-going collaboration debate, too many people view collaboration as a solution to a problem. It is not. Collaboration is the behaviour that emerges in contexts that invite for collaboration."

Over the last year, I've been doing a lot of research on how organizations will need to evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century. The central premise of this work is that new technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration - the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups.

After 15+ years of deploying more and more tools, we need to ask ourselves - why haven't organizations realized the level of breakthrough collaboration necessary for them to excel - or in some cases, survive? It's not that the industry has not had any "wins" with collaboration strategies but success always seems to be stubbornly limited to certain groups or business units. Improving collaboration, it seems, has become an "intractable opportunity.

Collaboration is the mantra of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, but organisational boundaries complicate adoption and progress. Therefore, we need someone who takes a holistic view of what is needed to get employees to work across silos. Good idea?

In the social enterprise debate, we always talk about collaboration, about connecting individuals. However, connecting more people as such should not be an objective. The thing that really matters is connecting the right people, which implies disconnecting from the wrong ones.

Internal collaboration is almost universally viewed as good for an organization. Leaders routinely challenge employees to tear down silos, transcend boundaries, and work together in cross-unit teams. And although such initiatives often meet with resistance because they place an extra burden on individuals, the potential benefits of collaboration are significant: innovative cross-unit product development, increased sales through cross-selling, the transfer of best practices that reduce costs.

Collaboration is one of those words that everybody loves and uses. At many companies, at least until the recession hit, collaboration was a mark of progressivity.

Cooperation, despite being now considered the third force of evolution, just behind mutation and natural selection, is difficult to explain in the context of an evolutionary process based on competition between individuals and selfish behaviour. But this puzzle, that has haunted scientists for decades, is now a little closer to be solved by research about to be published on the journal Physical Review Letters.

As high-tech supply chains increase in complexity, they become harder to manage. Collaboration between OEMs, suppliers, and retailers is the answer.

Formalizing a company's ad hoc peer groups can spur collaboration and unlock value.

Recent evolutions in our understanding of physics and biology indicate that our environment, including ourselves, is the result of a far-reaching process of interaction and complementarity. Apparently, something makes that matter and organisms -automatically- collaborate growing to larger and more complex entities. Is there a place for business in the universe?