LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, mashups, blogs... Web 2.0 technology facilitates and encourages online collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Inherently social and collaborative, web 2.0 has tremendous potential to support and drive the innovation process. Researchers from Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School joined forces with Flanders DC to identify the prerequisites for success.
We are living in a knowledge society. In such a context, performance and success are driven by an organisation’s ability to innovate, to stay ahead of the competition in essentially mature markets. It is therefore crucial to spot and pick up on new ideas quickly and to collaborate to bring about synergies between different ideas.
“Much like nuclei colliding to form molecules, increasing the probability of the collision of ideas can generate new ideas and knowledge,” explains Steven De Hertogh, PhD researcher. This very collaboration and merging of ideas is exactly what happens in our private lives when we use web 2.0 platforms or social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. And now companies are looking for ways to incorporate this dynamic and collaborative interactivity into what is being dubbed enterprise 2.0.
Steven De Hertogh: “We had found that companies were interested in web 2.0 technology, but that they were struggling with how to go about implementing it. Our study set out to analyse web 2.0 initiatives taken by different companies, to find out what works, what doesn’t, and why.”
The starting point was a theoretical model, distinguishing between three factors that contribute to the value created by any technology investment: the technology itself (the means), an organisation’s objectives (the ends) and the organisational complements, i.e. the new working practices and other organisational changes required to successfully implement the chosen technology (the ways).
“Don’t assume that people will start using a tool simply because it’s made available, and that the mere use of the tool automatically leads to collective creativity and innovation,” Steven De Hertogh warns.
Firstly, it is important that the company has, for example, established a knowledge-sharing culture in which people are encouraged to share ideas rather than hoard them. Secondly, successful implementation also assumes a different approach to collaboration. Web 2.0 technology enables spontaneous team formation across departmental boundaries. People decide for themselves whether or not they want to take part, which for most organisations is not their usual approach. Thirdly, web 2.0 technology impacts on the way an organisation deals with processes and process optimisation. Instead of defining, modelling and optimising processes from the top down, it creates a collaborative environment in which people, based on experiences and insights they share with colleagues, could start redefining and improving business processes themselves, enabling a continuous improvement and learning process. And finally, the principle of empowerment plays an important part. Not only in the allocation of decision rights and responsibilities, but also with regard to IT governance in general. In a web 2.0 context, organisations should embrace the principle that IT governance ought to seek to stimulate and enable desirable use of resources rather than prevent unwanted use.
Web 2.0 is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Bekaert, for example, has understood this point perfectly. When it launched its interactive Innovation Portal in 2004, it did so with two clear-cut objectives: to bring about cross-border collective creativity – involving Bekaert employees - and achieve open innovation – involving external knowledge partners.
The portal supports the early idea-generation phase, or fuzzy front end, of Bekaert’s innovation process by gathering ideas from across the Bekaert community. True to the enterprise 2.0 philosophy, employees from both technical and commercial departments, as well as external knowledge partners, are given a say. Intelligent use of web 2.0 technology ensures that the portal is more than just an electronic suggestion box and that the problems typically experienced in this part of the innovation funnel, such as too many ideas that are unusable or identical, are avoided.
The portal can automatically generate a ranking of the ideas portfolio. This ranking is based largely on peer-review functionality – enabling participants to evaluate one another’s contributions – and analysis of data about the community (page views, ratings, tags, flags, etc.). These two are combined in an algorithm in order to select the best ideas. Past trails of ideas and projects are easily retrievable through intelligent search capabilities. This saves reinventing the wheel, encouraging employees to learn from past mistakes or to revisit and pick up on ideas that were initially dismissed.
To keep the portal from becoming an amorphous tangle of ideas, Bekaert introduced the concept of “seeds”, i.e. strategic themes used to elicit ideas, which only certain users are allowed to post. Other than that, there are no restrictions on access rights for employees. Everyone can view and comment on all the seeds. For reasons of confidentiality, however, access rights for external knowledge partners are much more limited: they only have access to specific seeds.
Steven De Hertogh: “This is a fine example of a deliberate governance choice. But one that probably contributed to the relative lack of success of Bekaert’s open innovation initiatives. The external knowledge partners didn’t experience enough reciprocity. For them there was little or no incentive to participate. As for collective creativity, the innovation portal is a tremendous success.”
Does this mean that web 2.0 has no part to play in open innovation? “That’s exactly the reaction we want to avoid. It’s not just a matter of fighting it or embracing it. What it does show is that organisations will have to find new ways of governing in order to respect and harness the open and social characteristics of web 2.0. And they’ll have to think carefully about what information they can actually share.”
“We want to inform companies about web 2.0, its potential, but certainly also its pitfalls, in order to avoid the ‘trough of disillusionment’ associated with hypes. We also want to shorten the time to reach the ‘plateau of productivity’. Every choice and every investment should serve the right purpose. That’s why, as part of our study, we developed a web 2.0 readiness assessment tool.”
The assessment reveals the implications of a possible web 2.0 implementation. If the conclusion is that an organisation’s DNA is too far removed from what is needed to make web 2.0 a successful innovation enabler, then the organisation should not pursue a web 2.0 investment. “It would be impossible to create critical user mass and sufficient user commitment in such an organisation,” says Steven De Hertogh, adding: “The assessment helps organisations come to a considered decision, avoiding the jump-on-the-bandwagon effect.”
Web 1.0 refers to the early years of the Internet. Web 2.0 is an evolution of the Internet, which is as much about the technology, i.e. interfaces enabling users to interact with content as well as with one another, as it is about the use of this technology, i.e. embracing the inherently open and social characteristics of the Internet. That is why web 2.0 applications are typically referred to as social software. The two terms are often used interchangeably.
|
Web 1.0 |
Web 2.0 |
|
One-to-many communication |
Many-to-many communication |
|
Authoritarian, top-down |
Democratic, bottom-up |
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Passive user experience |
Active user participation |
|
Static content |
Dynamic, often user-generated content |
|
Centralised and closed |
Collaborative and open |
The study aims to inform companies about the possibilities and prerequisites of web 2.0 technology in order to:
Hype cycle (image adapted from Murphy, 2005)
Article from Vlerick Reflect - Issue May 2010
Published on 25/05/2010
