Article Idea:
The Collaboration / Innovation Imperative
suggested by Amy M. A. Vickers on 2007/02/06
Whether referring to Peter Kropotkin’s critique of Darwinian natural selection, how Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s consistently won more games per season than any other major league team despite one of the lowest payrolls, or the development of GNU and Linux – innovation through collaboration is profoundly successful (and controversial).
So what’s the import for user experience professionals? In order to realize innovation through collaboration, we need to strategically deploy tools like collective blogs, prediction markets, social networks, and wikis in the enterprise. Unfortunately many enterprises are structured in silos, replete with internal competition, and prone to knowledge hording. What’s a collaborator to do?
This essay will give you step by step instructions and lots of examples.
(I am giving a presentation on this at Harvard Business School on February 12, and afterwards I will post the deck to my website and submit a link here.)
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
14 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
Patrick C. Walsh
31 Reputation points
Posted 2007/02/09 @ 06:55AM with
I am a great fan of Darwin who is sadly misunderstood in some areas (haven’t read Kropotkin yet). His theory was hijacked to a certain extent by imperialists who thought it gave them carte blanche to oppress everyone else. ‘Survival of the fittest’ was coined by Darwin but put into another context by people like Andrew Carnegie.
Darwin argued that through variation of the species those with favourable traits would survive – natural selection. This does not imply that fittest=strongest or most ruthless. These traits include camouflage, being good at running away and, of course, the trait which led to human survival – teamwork. A team of hunters are more productive (can kill bigger animals) and ‘altruism’, looking after sick and old members of the group, is beneficial, its just insurance for your future and older people in many cultures were traditionally the keepers of valuable knowledge for the group.
I think that this is a great idea and I would love to see an article on this.