21CLeadership

Innovation opportunity: Turn products into services   How can your products be turned into services, and your services re-thought to make them even more comprehensive? This growing area offers many opportunities for innovation, says Jeffrey Baumgartner.   Bridging the innovation planning gap   Open innovation: How to develop a successful technology licensing program   In innovation, the simple trumps the complex

Executives at the more highly networked companies in our survey reported that they captured a broad set of benefits from their Web investments. A key question remained, however: do these benefits translate into fundamental performance improvements, measured by self-reported market share gains and higher profits?

A key theme that emerges from the discussions is that many of these technologies start at a company's grassroots level. Because many of these tools are easy to implement, small groups of interested individuals can launch informal pilots to test their viability. "We have been very customer driven and quite ad hoc," one executive explains. "As we grow we are formalizing the process, but it is still driven by inspiration [and] passion from key stakeholders."

A few years ago, the world's leading designer and manufacturer of office products decided that it needed an organizational overhaul. Coordination across product lines was poor. Design teams collaborated ineffectively. Key personnel were remote from customers. The company responded in part by reorganizing its work space, creating an office-free "village" where designers and architects could mingle and collaborate and customers could visit easily. Proximity does matter for promoting collaboration, and the space was conceptually compelling and visually appealing.

While there isn't one right culture, just as culture is tough to compare across organizations, there are certain common elements of organizations that do well with these types of initiatives. Charlene Li sums it up best: "be open, be transparent, be authentic".

statistics about our changing world. There are for more interesting numbers and resources than I could ever reference so I'm creating this post (which will get revised over time) to point you to their sources.

Twitter for Business Whatever the size of your organization, make the most of Twitter.

In my last blog post on connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets, I wrote a little bit about the appropriateness of mechanical metaphors and models in complex times. While I never used the term explicitly the competing metaphor to the mechanical, which Ephraim picked up on in his comments, is the organic.

Ross Dawson, the new functions

In more complex terms, interaction design is a discipline that borrows from product, industrial, graphic, interface and web design, as well as cognitive psychology, human computer interaction, computer science, information communication technology (ICT)-and architecture. Interaction design is never the same thing in two different places. As many histories of interaction design exist as there are disciplines that borrow from them.

a synthesis of the thinking in a whole host of recent management books that propose the reinvention of management

There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channels. Good overview of social media at work