Optimize the Collaboration Process and Speed Innovation

Extract from www.Collaborate.com monthly newsletter, June, 2003. Reproduced with permission.

By Julia Young and David Coleman

In our April, 2003 newsletter we explored Group Decision Making Systems (GDSS) and e-Meetings and the potential for optimizing meetings through attention to the collaboration process. Innovation is one application area where this melding of collaborative decision-making process and technology in an e-meeting environment provide direct business advantages.

Business Demands Open Innovation Model

In the closed innovation model companies build central labs to research and develop technology and products that pay for continued R&D. Henry Chesbrough writes in his book, "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology," that this is still valid for certain industries, but is no longer applicable for many more. The obsolescence of the closed innovation paradigm has been hastened by a quartet of factors:

• The explosive growth of skilled, mobile workers willing to "surf" from company to company, selling their talents to the highest bidder.
• The venture capital market, providing funds for small firms to lure talent with attractive risk/reward compensation packages.
• The external development options provide a path to market for ideas that otherwise sit on the shelf when a company's internal development organization is not ready to use a new research result.
• The increasing capability of external suppliers with offerings that are now often of equal or superior quality to what a company can achieve internally.

To take advantage of the changes brought about by these factors, companies must move to an open innovation model that can tap into a much more diffuse knowledge base and leverage external research inputs that could yield new products and services, writes Chesbrough. We suggest that collaboration technology and process have a key role to play. GDSS tools used in an e-meeting environment offer a means to brainstorm and capture ideas from a large and potentially diverse knowledge base across an organization, a customer or supplier base or even across marketplaces. The e-meeting provides the infrastructure for parallel unlimited input, persistence of data and end-to-end security. The GDSS tools enable collaborative group processes that optimize innovative thinking, such as anonymous parallel brainstorming, asynchronous facilitation, mind mapping, and multi-criteria voting.

Collaborative group processes and e-meeting tools for innovation

Successful collaboration requires context, content and process. The business imperative for innovative products and processes provides the context for building collaborative practices that cross organizational barriers and draw on the content expertise of resources from multiple sources and locations. Structured and focused group processes, such as the Creativity Templates described by Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky in "Creativity in Product Innovation," deliver the methodology to initiate and capture innovative ideas and alternatives. Collaboration technology, specifically GDSS tools in an e-meeting environment, offer the opportunity to bring context, content and process together, an opportunity that is only now beginning to be realized. GDSS tools offer a number of potential benefits that support innovation:

• Ease of access enabling more people to participate.
• Synchronous and asynchronous flexibility to match schedules and time zones.
• Parallel processing, allowing participants to all "talk" at once while investigating and building on each other’s ideas.
• Individual processing, allowing participants to stay with an idea or train of thought as long as it engages them.
• Options for anonymity for less inhibited generation of ideas.
• Structured "drill-down" topics, addressing specific problem statements.
• Rapid group selection of "good" ideas for further exploration.
• Group satisfaction with level of participation and increased buy-in to results.

Goldenberg and Mazursky note the value that electronic brainstorming provides to creativity in product development with particular advantages over traditional brainstorming methods. Both the quantity and quality of ideas are increased. They also emphasize the importance of providing a focus for brainstorming, or "focused-storming", that allows many minds working under well-defined direction to produce innovation.

Innovation in Practice

To explore electronic meeting tools and innovation further it is helpful to look at two recent examples that illustrate large and small group process. Both examples used facilitate.com as the GDSS facilitation and innovation tool.

Joint Forces Experimentation Event

In May 2003 the US military used GDSS tools in an e-meeting to conduct a large scale discovery experiment, "Discovery experiments" provide innovative systems, concepts, organizational structures, or technologies in an observable and documented setting. These experiments aim to produce and use new ideas to identify potential benefits, as well as the most effective conditions under which to employ these innovations; discovery experiments often weed out unworkable ideas and lay the foundation for more rigorous testing, assessment, and refinement. In this instance the collaborative software FacilitatePro was used to bring specialists from all branches of the US military together with international experts to brainstorm ideas and develop innovative approaches to future operations. Anonymity provided for an open exchange of ideas among senior military representatives and "young turks", who usually just sit and listen. Categorization and prioritization tools allowed for immediate evaluation of possibilities against defined criteria. Complete electronic documentation allowed for further analysis and rapid preparation of reports and recommendations. The GDSS tools’ most significant contribution was to give voice to the 140+ participants who would normally be only observers. The result was a dramatic increase in the amount of expertise and ideas contributed to the discussion. The anticipated outcome, after analysts have processed the data and cross-referenced the results with those of prior experiments is innovation in joint warfare concepts. Participant feedback survey results show that the collaboration tools significantly enhanced the effectiveness of and participation in this innovation exercise.

Figure 1: Results of Using Facilitate.com

In the next iteration, experiments will begin to host distributed events, enabling experts from around the world to contribute ideas in a focused virtual e-meeting environment. Benefits will include a significant reduction in the costs associated with hosting a large group event as well as a rapid turnaround of ideas and more timely innovation.

Process Innovation through Virtual Focus Groups

Our second example illustrates the benefits of bringing content experts from across a multi-national organization into a focused idea generation and prioritization exercise to improve organizational policies and procedures. In their no-nonsense book GE Work-Out, Dave Ulrich, Steve Kerr and Ron Ashkenas set out a practical approach to using creative problem solving and collaborative process to bust bureaucracy and attack organizational problems - fast. Initiated at GE, and adopted by other large organizations such as GM and AT&T, this consensus driven process provides a productive mixture of structure and open idea generation to enable innovation followed by execution. This approach is now being implemented using e-meeting technology to enable content experts to come together online, further speeding the process and eliminating travel costs, while continuing to provide for a rich level of collaboration and innovative thinking. Two key elements of these successful virtual focus groups are a clearly defined methodology that supports creative thinking and technology that complements and enables rather than drives this process. In one such virtual focus group sixteen team members dialed in over the Internet and by phone from across Canada. The meeting facilitators were in Detroit, MI and San Francisco, CA. The meeting process consisted presentations conducted using PlaceWare web conferencing technology followed by a series of electronic brainstorming topics using FacilitatePro. A telephone conference enabled easy communication throughout and allowed for a mixture on online and verbal dialogue. Innovative ideas for process improvement were categorized, prioritized and further developed in a highly interactive process. The team leader and facilitators kept the process moving, ensuring the right balance of creativity and focus to get the desired results. At the end of the three-hour session participants expressed enthusiasm for the process and a high level of satisfaction with the end result. All meeting content was fully documented and immediately available to team members and project owner alike.

Rich Opportunity to Meld Collaboration Process and Technology

Our examples illustrate how some leading-edge organizations are using GDSS tools in an e-meeting environment for complex collaborative events. This potent combination of creative and focused group process coupled with collaborative decision-making processes, and technology (GDSS tools) in an e-meeting environment offer a rich opportunity to build innovative solutions in a competitive global marketplace.

References

http://www.darwinmag.com/read/050103/open.html
Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Harvard Business School Press. Copyright 2003, by Henry Chesbrough

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/inc/2003/04/21/inc24451.html
The Innovation Factor: A Field Guide to Innovation, April 23, 2003
Inc.com @Forbes.com

Creativity in Product Innovation
Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky
Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (January 31, 2002)

The GE Work-Out : How to Implement GE's Revolutionary Method for Busting Bureaucracy & Attacking Organizational Problems
Dave Ulrich, Steve Kerr, Ron Ashkenas
McGraw-Hill Trade; 1st edition (March 25, 2002)

Collaborative Strategies, LLC
www.Collaborate.com, 415/282-9197

Julia Young is co-founder and Vice President of Facilitate.com, Inc. a San Francisco based company specializing in collaboration software and services for brainstorming and decision-making. An expert facilitator and group process consultant, she has spent the last ten years developing techniques and applications for collaborative technology. Julia is happy to answer questions and share ideas about the practical implementation of collaboration software and can be reached by e-mail at Julia@Facilitate.com or by telephone at 415/647-1335.

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies LLC (CS) and the editor of "Inside Collaboration". CS is the leading analyst firm covering collaboration technologies and its use. Serving both vendors and end-users of these technologies, CS provides a variety of publications and services that help these populations in being more successful in selling or using collaboration technologies. For more information about Collaborative Strategies, visit the web site at www.Collaborate.com. Collaborative Strategies can be reached by e-mail at davidc@collaborate.com, or by telephone at 415/282-9197.

For more tips on meeting facilitation, visit our Resources page.