Getting Social

Network innovation is growing... person to person in online forums and office corridors.

Innovation has gotten a bad rap. The term evokes scientists toiling over test tubes under the harsh glare of laboratory lights. To be sure, a good deal of R&D, particularly around specific product development, results from such structured discovery. Increasingly, however, radical innovations are being hatched outside the lab. And companies are often learning that open communication unlocks innovation better than reliance on lonely pursuit does. Informally, in online forums and office corridors, people from divergent backgrounds learn of each other's interests and challenges and discover unexpected business opportunities. And ascompanies pursue innovation, technology becomes a vital tool in connecting global networks of consumers, suppliers and even competitors.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is featuring Farmavita.Net in their recent report on innovation. Donwnload free 16 pages report at our Download Section 

Weak ties drive powerful connections

Social networking isn't new, but the level of mass connectivity available today has upped the ante on understanding-and leveraging-the phenomenon. In his landmark 1973 study, "The Strength of Weak Ties," renowned sociologist Mark Granovetter shed light on the social and economic benefit that people and, ultimately, firms derive from loose collections of acquaintances. "In scientific fields, new information and ideas are more efficiently diffused through weak ties," Granovetter wrote, noting that the phenomenon can have a powerful impact. Using today's social networking technology, companies worldwide are beginning to leverage the same weak ties that have driven the massive consumer popularity of social networking Web sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Myspace. According to recent reports, spending on Enterprise 2.0 or social technologies is expected to soar from $764 million in 2008 to $4.6 billion by 2013, with US businesses accounting for roughly 60% of that. They aim to improve the keys to innovation: communication, teamwork, problem solving, learning and creativity.

You don't know what, or who, you don't know

Until recently, you may have known enough about the work or interests of perhaps 10 colleagues to be able to refer their expertise to a friend. While an organization's output may have been easy to find on a corporate intranet, the social context in which those products or services were created has been largely invisible. That's changing quickly. Companies on the leading edge of the social technology revolution are implementing "Facebook cultures" to help uncover weak ties within their organizations. According to Forrester Research, one global software provider empowers employees with a collaboration tool "in which a single query searches 80,000 colleagues' contact info, professional affiliations, skills, personal interest, personal blogs, communities, and person documents to find who can help" with a specialized technical question. California-based Serena software has adopted Facebook-a Web site already familiar to many of its employees-as its corporate intranet. Through Facebook, employees provide secure links to internal business documents. By exploring the information itself, employees also learn about the people providing and developing it, creating the social context to nurture innovation.

Building a connected culture

Adopting popular, consumer-based Web sites as corporate intranets may seem extreme, but big brands are also exploring social technologies-many with great success. Consumer electronics giant Best Buy, for example, launched its own internal, online community called BlueShirt Nation (BSN) in early 2007. Within a year, BSN had over 20,000 members-roughly 15% of the company's employee base-all joining based on referrals or word of mouth. BSN was built on free, open-source software, and the site's start-up costs rang in at a mere $100 for the domain name and one year of Web hosting. Best Buy's networking site works to "embrace innovation and collaboration from anywhere...It challenges people to think differently,"company cofounder Gary Koelling says. "BlueShirt Nation is the result of a reorganizing force that's coming to bear on American corporations," Koelling wrote on his personal blog on June 6, 2008. "The social contract is being rewritten. The nature of our relationships to each other is being redefined." Koelling continues: "Organizing as a hierarchy is no longer enough. A network is no longer defined as names in a Rolodex or an Outlook address book; it's how we organize, connect and collaborate. To make stuff. To do stuff. To know stuff."

Lowering the drawbridge

Increasingly, organizations are using social technologies to plumb communities outside their own walls, looking toward consumers, suppliers and even competitors. Famously, LEGO, the Danish toy manufacturer, released the software behind its robotics product as open source in May 2006 to a Web community of enthusiastic users. "Most often, innovation comes from the core community of users," says Søren Lund, director of LEGO Mindstorms at the time of the open-source announcement. "When we launched the legacy Mindstorms platform in 1998, the community found ways to do these things on their own, and we were faced with the question of whether to allow it, which we decided to embrace and encourage. Now, given the strong user base and versatility and power of the [product], the right to hack is a no-brainer." The open-source movement, begun by software developers, now extends into fields such as scientific R&D. Farmavita.Net, a community of pharmaceutical executives, innovators and researchers, is using social technologies to spur pharmaceutical development in less-developed economies where production falls short. The organization invites established manufacturers to share critical knowledge, such as information around active ingredients, formulation and manufacturing instructions and quality control methods.

Beam me up, Scotty

Teleportation may not be on the horizon, but telepresence is here now, and it's changing the way people interact. Unlike typical videoconferencing, telepresence gives participants a sense of immersion-of truly "being there," no matter how remote their location. It does this through high-definition, life-size images, cameras that capture eye contact, and surround sound. Telepresence suites allow real-time sharing, review, revision and documentation, bringing a true convergence of our physical and virtual social worlds. DreamWorks Animation SKG, whose products are founded almost entirely on collaborative innovation, adopted telepresence early,equipping each DreamWorks production site with a telepresence studio. "Innovation is a critical part of the filmmaking process at DreamWorks Animation," says Ed Leonard, the company's chief technology officer, noting that telepresence has fundamentally changed how the company does business. "Studio executives say it's like the difference between using a typewriter compared to a computer," he says. Looking ahead, business conversations supported by telepresence could become part of a company's social history and lead to further collaboration and innovation. Supported by other Enterprise 2.0 tools, these meetings can be captured on video and published internally for colleagues who weren't part of the initial conversation. Each video might be commented on, updated and linked to other interactive documents in a self-perpetuating network of fungible knowledge. And, more important, every act of viewing, reading, commenting or linking establishes another tie between people with common interests and innovative ideas.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is featuring Farmavita.Net in their recent report on innovation.Donwnload free 16 pages report at our Download Section

PricewaterhouseCoopers (or PwC) is one of the world's largest professional services firms. PricewaterhouseCoopers earned aggregated worldwide revenues of $28 billion for fiscal 2008, and employed over 146,000 people in 150 countries.

• Top 10 Biotechnology Companies (08/02/2010)
• Open Innovation (01/09/2009)
• Pharmaceutical Social Networks (10/07/2009)

• Virtual Research & Development (26/04/2009)
• Smart Money (12/04/2009)
• Open Innovation Against Crisis (04/03/2009)
• Open Innovation in Pharma (04/03/2009)
• Open Innovation (09/06/2008)
• Shift Happens (31/05/2008)
• Social Networking (25/05/2008)
• Business Networking (29/03/2007)
• Open Source Pharmaceuticals - New Business Model (12/01/2007)

---