MITWorld is another good place to explore latest thinking. So, e.g. the excellent presentation of John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) on “Building the Next Generation Company”. Thanks a lot to Jon Husband, whose blog Wirearchy (BTW: good KM blog) has pointed me to the MITWorld videos.
John Chambers is an eloquent presenter and introduces his audience at MIT to the change Cisco has undertaken in the last 2-3 years during the first 30 minutes of the talk. The enterprise-wide collaboration which has been set up at Cisco has enabled the company to now drive 26 strategic priorities in parallel in 2009 (instead of 2 three years ago).
It may not come as a surprise to a knowledge manager that John Chambers outlined the importance of a threefold approach to be successful with the transition to a collaborative company: process (CEO lead, tied to market transition goals, working groups…), technology (enable innovation, collaborative tools, …), and culture (viral, accountability, reward, enforce common processes, adopt or eliminate,…). John also talks about his personal change management experience while implementing collaboration at Cisco: from command + control to listen + trust.
Examples (IM)
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Collaboration = Speed + Scale
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009Contextual information is the sixth sense
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from the MIT Media Lab demonstrate a new way to access, manage and create information in daily life with a portable device. The sixth sense project shows how powerful a combination of off-the-shelf devices, smart software, and mobile information will be in the near future. Once again, a wonderful TED presentation.
Collaborative innovation powered by a tool?
Monday, March 2nd, 2009I’ve been invited to take part in the OpenTeams group at LinkedIn. OpenTeams is a SaaS collaborative software that offers a pretty ambitious value proposition. The strange thing is that at first glance OpenTeams offers just a tool (a kind of improved wiki), nothing else. So, how will this value be delivered? I assume that it will not be delivered: there is no indication of success stories on “enabled innovative enterpreneurial organizations” or similar examples on the website.
At second glance (and to be fair) there is not only the tool but a new management model which has been implemented at OpenTeams LLC. Tory Gattis, the founder and president of OpenTeams, calls himself a social system architect, a role which he plays e.g. in his hometown Houston (Texas) and describes in his blog Houston Strategies.
Sustainability Why Not?
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker for the first time in 2008, offers a new collaborative website on “sustainability” innovation. The site combines appealing visualization, marketing for its own innovations, and last but not least a contest to elicit even more ideas for safety, water, land, air, community, and energy topics. Well done, however, the site is just collecting the ideas with only limited interaction opportunities. It goes along with the current US marketing campaign. A background on the campaign is given e.g. in this blog post.
Thanks to Jens Hoffmann for pointing me to the “Lean Thinking” group at Xing where I came across the link in a recent post.
Support developing-world enterpreneurs
Monday, October 27th, 2008
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva connects enterpreneurs who would like to fund investments with lenders like you and me. Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this. Kiva makes not an extensive use of social networks features up to now.
One Laptop Per Child (for Germany please)
Monday, July 28th, 2008My daughter has closed her first year at the local primary school. The exposure to new technologies during this first year was 0.0% of all lessons. If you linger along the corridors and across the classrooms of this school you will remember your own primary school days back in the seventies. Nothing has changed (Did you know that? 
…
Therefore, I admire the “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)” project by Nicolas Negroponte. It seems that OLPC has done important steps from vision (see e.g. the initial TED presentation) to execution (see e.g. the updated TED video). Nevertheless, what I do miss is an impact assessment: what has the usage of the OLPC really delivered for the children and schools involved?
TED2008: Food for KM Thought?
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008Thanks to the live bloggers Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani (other bloggers) I got a good overview on the presentations that have been made at the TED2008 Conference last week (BTW: Ethan and Bruno offer also a guide on how to blog at conferences).
So, which were the presentations with “food for KM thought” potential?
- The collaborative 72-hour-product development by Ben Kaufmann (Kluster project)
- The visual recording and synthetizing of ideas by Kevin Richards and David Sibbet
- The Livescribe smartpen demo by Jim Marggraff
- Freeconomics by Chris Anderson
- Walter Isaacson on the future of the art of narration
IT and Ecosystem – a new metaphor
Saturday, December 16th, 2006I studied Environmental Sciences some 15 years ago. I was educated in interdisciplinary sciences (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, economy, psychology, communication) and in the management of complex systems. It was at that time that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology reacted to environmental catastrophes like Chernobyl or Schweizerhalle by establishing the interdisciplinary study of Environmental Sciences. The study itself was an innovation in the academic landscape and the students were co-designers of the study course.
In the last couple of years a trend seems to have developed towards the use of metaphors related to the environment. I want to introduce just four of these that I’ve encountered during the last few weeks.
Nachtrag zu [Emerging Technology]
Thursday, March 16th, 2006Die Inhalte aller Beiträge von Emerging Technology sind verfügbar.
Emerging Technology
Sunday, March 5th, 2006… nennt sich die Konferenz von O’Reilly, die sich um folgende Fragen dreht: “How do we visualize all of this digital data, filter it, remix it, and access it in meaningful ways?”.
“It’s time to build the attention economy” ist das Motto der diesjährigen Konferenz. Das kommt mir zwar nicht neu vor, ich erinnere mich an Tom Davenport’s Buch “The Attention Economy“, aber seien wir mal gespannt, was an Beiträgen kommt (einstündige Podcasts sind als tägliche Beigabe für die Nicht-Teilnehmer vorgesehen).
