Group items tagged

Join the CGIAR, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the KM4Dev Community , the United Nations Children's Fund and the United Nations Development Programme in creating and growing this resource of knowledge sharing tools and methods. While these are applicable in a wide range of contexts, we hope that together we can help frame them in the context of international development with a focus on agriculture, fisheries, food and nutrition, forestry and sustainable development.

Google Search itself provides one of the most familiar examples of predictive intelligence. When you enter keywords in the search box, Google predicts what you are interested in and then presents you with results that match that intent. Since it released the first version of its Prediction API in 2010, Google has made some of these methods available to developers. Adoption among developers has not been high because machine learning requires a lot of infrastructure and validation to produce accurate results. Developers have also reported discomfort with basing products on black box APIs.

" Dr Alex Linley website showing links articles and research in relation to developing strengths based organisations. Working with what people excel at rather than trying to develop their weaknesses."

"Dr Alex Linley website showing links articles and research in relation to developing strengths based organisations. Working with what people excel at rather than trying to develop their weaknesses."

McKinsey have developed an approach to retention: to detect previously unobserved behavioural patterns, they combine various data sources with machine-learning algorithms. Workshops and interviews are used to generate ideas and a set of hypotheses. Over time they collected hundreds of data points to test. Then ran different algorithms to get insights at a broad organisational level, to identify specific employee clusters, and to make individual predictions. Finally they held a series of workshops and focus groups to validate the insights from our models and to develop a series of concrete interventions. The insights were surprising and at times counterintuitive. They expected factors such as an individual's performance rating or compensation to be the top predictors of unwanted attrition. But analysis revealed that a lack of mentoring and coaching and of "affiliation" with people who have similar interests were actually top of list. More specifically, "flight risk" across the firm fell by 20 to 40 percent when coaching and mentoring were deemed satisfying.

McKinsey have developed an approach to retention: to detect previously unobserved behavioural patterns, they combine various data sources with machine-learning algorithms. Workshops and interviews are used to generate ideas and a set of hypotheses. Over time they collected hundreds of data points to test. Then ran different algorithms to get insights at a broad organisational level, to identify specific employee clusters, and to make individual predictions. Finally they held a series of workshops and focus groups to validate the insights from our models and to develop a series of concrete interventions. The insights were surprising and at times counterintuitive. They expected factors such as an individual's performance rating or compensation to be the top predictors of unwanted attrition. But analysis revealed that a lack of mentoring and coaching and of "affiliation" with people who have similar interests were actually top of list. More specifically, "flight risk" across the firm fell by 20 to 40 percent when coaching and mentoring were deemed satisfying.

"Hans Rosling is debunking the River of Myths about the developing world. By measuring the progress in the once labeled "developing countries", preventable child mortality can be history by the year 2030."

IBM sees great opportunity by offering Watson as a service other companies and developers can access through API's in order to develop their own applications.

The Management 2.0 Hackathon, a joint collaborative effort by the MIX, Saba, and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, was inspired by hacakathons in the world of software development. A management hackathon is a short, intense, coordinated effort to develop useful hacks-innovative ideas or solutions-that can be implemented by organizations to overcome barriers to progress and innovation.

"Tullow Oil, a London-based independent oil and gas exploration and production company, regularly wins awards for its innovative approach to problem solving. Its business culture is based on investing in the best people and then trusting them to work together to keep Tullow on the leading edge of the industry. Tullow's CIO recently challenged his team to develop an approach to devolve control of IT project prioritization to non-IT leaders within the company. This article explains the approach developed and how it is working to keep the business's IT strategy aligned with Tullow's entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to collaborative decision making."

"Ashley Good from Toronto, Canada is recognized as no less than "a world expert on failure". Working on several development projects around the world she was faced with the need to address the inefficiencies, and sometimes ineffectiveness of development work. Based on her experience she created AdmittingFailure.com and FailForward.org in 2010 to spark a shift in how civil society perceives and talks about failure. In her opening keynote titled "What's So Great About Failure?" at FailCon Oslo June 6, 2013 she shares her story and some ideas for the audience to apply the Fail Forward approach to their contexts."

Excellent blog on how the West can learn from innovations in developing countries. This may use digital media as an example, but the principle must surely apply to solution finding and innovation in many contexts.

" backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent. Content feeds are available for people to build with on a non-commercial basis."

Syngenta is a global agriculture business that helps farmers make better use of their available resources, primarily through agrochemical and seed production. In order to continue to advance crop productivity, it invested more than $1.4bn in research and development (R&D) across 150 international sites in 2014.

The implications of advancing technology to a point where its applications can mimic, assume or replace the role of people, to a point where humankind is no longer needed to guide such developments, leads to a multitude of questions about what this means for the future of society.

Amazon is pursuing an open-systems approach that allows quick development of many features, while Apple is taking a slower route, asserting more control over the technology in order to assure security and ease-of-use.

"Gareth Morgan (Porthcawl, Wales, 22 December, 1943) is a British / Canadian [organizational theorist]], management consultant and Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto. He is known as creator of the "organisational metaphor" concept and writer of the bestsellers Images of Organization.[1], Imaginization: New Mindsets for Seeing, Organizing and Managing, Riding the Waves of Change and other books on management. He is also well known for his writings on social theory and research methodology, especially through his books Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (written with Gibson Burrell)and Beyond Method: Strategies for Social Research. The common theme uniting his work is that of challenging assumptions - to help develop new ways of thinking in social research, organization and management theory and practice, and, by implication, in everyday life."

"Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can't make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can't determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case. We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitatio

APQC's Knowledge Management (KM) Capability Assessment Tool is a diagnostic that lets KM practitioners measure every aspect of their KM programs, from strategy and business case development to specific processes and technologies, and find out how they stack up against the competition. This white paper describes the assessment tool, the 12 categories in which participating organizations are measured, and how knowledge managers can leverage the assessment results to improve their strategic decision making.

Innovation based on reuse of ideas. Making existing products, developed over many years (in this instance vodka) even better.

"To truly embed innovation and agility, we have to be able to collaborate, work across boundaries within and between organizations, to bring together disparate experiences and perspectives, and to properly empower people to come up with ideas and make change happen. In other words, we have to build different corporate cultures and ways of working". Peter Cheese, CEO Chartered institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) These elements are the "softer" side of agility. But they are also the most critical enablers of change and adaptation, and they are harder to understand and to put into effect, which is why they are so often underestimated or misunderstood.