Web-based Innovation Collaboration
Collaboration can be a powerful tool in business or any area of life. A collaborative environment, though, can be difficult to create and maintain. Even in situations where employees are located in the same building, or even on the same floor, collaboration can be stifled by personalities, busy schedules, vacations, and a myriad of other obstacles that come up everyday. When businesses have offices across the US or around the world where colleagues are separated by geography, time zones, and language barriers, a collaborative environment can quickly become a fiction.
In reality, meeting face-to-face or by phone is an inefficient way to collaborate. It is too difficult to connect. An innovation management system should create a collaborative environment in the same way that the Web does … with blogs. Ideally, a good innovation management system should automatically turn innovation records into internal “executive blogs.” It should also allow for concept clustering and user alerts so that relevant ideas can be pushed out to interested colleagues throughout the world. This enables managers to set alerts not only by bibliographic fields such as author and title, but also by concepts. With such capabilities, employees can “collaborate” on their own time. Invention records can be enhanced with comments from employees throughout the company, regardless of where they work or whom they know. Suddenly, many barriers to meaningful communication can be eliminated.
This is the fifth in a series of articles on this blog about Best Practices For Successful Innovation Management. For more in this series, see:
