November 27, 2019

Understanding why you should use either Teams or Yammer can be hard to articulate when you put the tool first. Put the people first, however, and it becomes much clearer...

August 27, 2018

The workplace of tomorrow is long overdue. It sounds like an anomaly, but think about it. Today's workplace runs still largely according to Victorian values. We come to a workplace where we are managed in hierarchical structures, kept in one place for set hours every day, then go home to our 'other' lives...

September 16, 2018

Good collaboration produces innovation. So therefore, good collaboration on enterprise social networks produces crowd-sourced ideas and new innovations, right? It's still a lottery, relying on spontaneous connections. We can, however, beat the odds...

May 28, 2018

If you want real innovation from your workforce, running an “innovation campaign” will foster creativity. If you treat innovation as an open-ended suggestion box, the result will largely be suggestions for improvements or solutions looking for problems to solve. The chances of genuine creativity are slim...

April 19, 2018

Whatever your approach, enterprise social network (ESN) tools such as Yammer and Workplace by Facebook  are gaining a foothold as highly useful innovation tools. A number of specialist open innovation tools are also available that combine social with innovation management. Here are some ways to align them with core innovation phases...

February 28, 2018

Enterprise social networks (ESN) are buzzing. Or so we hear. Yet for every company bragging about their amazing ESN adoption rates, we also hear many more tales of how hard it’s been, of how an organization has struggled to find any real purpose. But if you’ve already deployed your ESN or it's part of a wider suite of tools, all is not lost. Here are five things you can do today to energize your enterprise social network...

November 30, 2017

The demand for innovation has now spread from primary industries to the tertiary sector — from products to services. So how do we innovate in workplaces that have typically relied on their core offerings, knowledge and skill-base rather than invention? Innovation tools are becoming more sophisticated and increasingly social to help fill this need...

August 28, 2017

The complex mix of people, facilities, IT tools and processes that make up a workplace are now being grouped under the umbrella of "employee experience." But dig a little deeper, does anything actually change? The same old barriers to innovation and change remain...

June 27, 2017

We invest in digital collaboration tools, therefore we see collaboration as the outcome, right? 

Unfortunately, the answer is largely a resounding no. Over the last year, I have been running workshops for multinational organizations on how to overcome collaboration's hurdles...

June 14, 2017

Cats, holidays, children, craft beer, more cats ....  The number of non-work related topics posted on workplace enterprise social media can boggle the mind, leading management to view enterprise social as a time waster, the long lunch of the digital workplace. But enterprise social serves a purpose and can help boost productivity.

July 25, 2017

Collaboration isn't a single check box. It isn’t a case of we either do it or we don't.

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​At Innosis we have identified two very different modes of collaboration. By understanding them, we can develop a more strategic approach to collaboration as a culture, and the tactics that can produce it.

May 03, 2017

“The objective of this program is to foster more effective collaboration”  Sound familiar? Management trots out this common refrain when new technology or even culture programs are rolled out... But collaboration is not an end point. Despite the statements...

April 11, 2017

Establishing innovation as part of the way we work in the digital workplace is the holy grail for many organizations. What we see, however, is that as we transplant face-to-face activities into virtual working, we lose that opportunity for innovation...

February 01, 2017

Coca Cola recently closed its Founders start-up incubator, citing difficulties in combining start-ups and the corporation. No doubt a substantial investment to walk away from. But connecting innovation incubators, specialist R&D units and innovation teams into the wider workforce rarely meets with success...

January 09, 2017

Like a move from cubicles to an open-plan office, we should prepare for more than just the physical changes. Infrastructure and legal requirements will be tackled, but what about the elements that affect how we behave and interact in the digital open-plan office? How can you plan for this?

October 11, 2016

Chances are, innovation is a strategic objective of your organization, if not exactly spelled out in those terms.

Attempts like these to layer innovation on top of corporate culture rarely translate into tangible changes in behavior or business outcomes. It just doesn't stick. Success stories are a rarity...

October 02, 2016

There's no denying it: two minds are better than one. That's the underlying principle of collaboration, and it's why businesses spend time and money trying to facilitate it.  Yet occasionally we reach a point where there is too much collaboration. And this can be as counterproductive as having no collaboration...

August 23, 2016

Innovators are a bunch of super-smart scientists or supremely creative beings. 

Or so we're led to believe. The good news is that most innovation doesn't come from an archetypal innovator or from "Eureka!" moments...

August 18, 2016

Collaboration is not an all-purpose fix-it for poor knowledge sharing that you just turn on like a tap. It should be focused on where it will be most valuable: business processes.

August 09, 2016

Innovation management provides an engineered, process-based approach to innovation: a purpose-built framework designed to extract innovative ideas and turn them into products and services that will leapfrog the competition.  But in reality, how often do these big ideas occur, these 'Eureka!' moments that we can capture using our Innovation Management framework?

July 06, 2016

Social collaboration tools are getting smarter. Vendors boast about the plethora of back end reports — numbers of users, posts, comments, likes, even sentiment, broken down across groups, silos, roles, you name it. So much data available, yet so little certainty of making your social collaboration initiative deliver on its promise.

June 12, 2016

Since I first came on the scene as a knowledge manager in 2008, knowledge managers have debated (and debated) the purpose of knowledge management (KM). What exactly is it? Why are we doing it? Is it about collaboration or about capturing what we know? Is it about sharing what we know?

June 08, 2016

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. And why not? If something works well, why not copy it. But innovation, I hear you say, is surely about inventing new things, not copying what's already been done. And you'd be right - the actual innovation is new. But imitation is a great innovation tactic ....

May 04, 2016

Risk drives much of our behavior at work. Engineers are brought up on controlling safety risk, knowledge workers tend to focus on liability risk. And we all are affected by reputation risk — the apparent harm of being noticed for something not entirely thought through. I've done it before ....

April 21, 2016

Global domination, extortion, revenge. Wonderfully eccentric fictional objectives, and certainly not those that we as ethical innovators aspire to! But even fictional characters are rooted in some form of human experience. So I wondered, what can we as observant human beings learn from Bond villains?

April 15, 2016

We love the digital workplace, with all the potential and advances it offers. But with these benefits comes a dark side, and that dark side is called Digital Workplace Chaos (DWC).

April 06, 2016

Back in the 1980s, around the time robots started replacing humans on automotive production lines, some pundits confidently predicted that automated systems would soon replace humans in most walks of life.

Yet here we are in 2015, humans are very much alive...

March 28, 2016

Collaboration is good. We know that. So why is it, with all this technology available to us and a world seemingly infatuated with social apps, so many collaboration initiatives fail to meet expectations?

February 12, 2016

It's all too easy to get to a point where collaborating just ... stops. 

When, despite our best efforts, we get lost in the maze of process that's part of any complex organization and tell ourselves we'll collaborate tomorrow, when we have more time...

February 25, 2016

Collaboration within medium and large organizations typically falls under a pull model: collaborating to pull knowledge out of the network to get a job done. Simple, basic collaboration, often driven more by technology vendors than by our own prescribed needs.

A push model, however, is a more advanced form of collaboration...

February 15, 2016

Let’s play snakes and ladders. Collaboration snakes and ladders. Every organization that launches a platform for the purpose of generating conversations across silos and speeding up the sharing of knowledge, whose intent is to make internal collaboration more ‘social’ and thereby more effective, plays this game — whether they realize it or not.

February 23, 2016

We're seeing the barista effect morph into our everyday lives: Getting on a bandwagon without fully understanding what the customer is really after.

The barista effect stems from the current trend for barista brewed coffee in cafes. Where the focus for many cafes is on the barista, the coffee machine and the t-shirts worn by staff that say 'barista' on them...

February 17, 2016

Technology is expanding into our lives, impacting our day-to-day activities in ways we would never have imagined when we were little. There are some truly inspiring innovations that have made the impossible possible, and ones that make our families safer.

Yet when I was young, I remember reading books of the future that were full of exciting concepts such as ocean cities...

November 24, 2015

Whether we want them or not, social collaboration tools are now standard issue in most enterprises. We've heard promises of instant collaboration, rivers of knowledge suddenly flowing through the organization, processes running 10 to 20 percent faster, an instantly transformed workplace which requires little ramp-up — people are already familiar with Facebook, right?...

December 21, 2015

The call to innovation is a noble call. An acknowledgement that great effort is needed to lead the market, or even to maintain a market presence. Businesses use it as a rallying cry, an initiative everyone can get behind.

But what if you make the call and no one responds? 

July 26, 2015

I was prompted by a New York Times article on one of the world's most recognised mathematicians, Terence Tao, to think about what the 'perfect innovator' looks like. What are the characteristics of such a person, what are the qualities that make them a great innovator. 

September 01, 2015

Uphold shareholder value. Maximise the return to our shareholder. Familiar messages to employees of public companies from their executives. Can't argue with the logic.

Except that the minute the positive return to shareholders becomes the driving dynamic behind an organisation, you have just put a formidable innovation blocker in front of your workforce...

July 29, 2015

I'm sure we've all heard the phrase "we're using innovative technologies, etc to deliver....". As an employee, or as a customer, doesn't it sound great to be part of something innovative? But look a little deeper, and is it really innovation? 

July 14, 2015

Idea capture is old school. A blunt instrument. The new school solution is staring us in the face. Every day organisations are moving towards more collaborative ways of working, using social platforms to increase the rates of staff interaction and conversations - and generating ideas.

February 23, 2015

We often think as nature as a balancing act, referring to ‘the balance of nature’. Nature is actually completely the opposite – it’s a process of constant renewal, adaptation and irrecoverable change. It absorbs external events - fires, floods, famine, rapacious flora and species - in surprisingly innovative ways...

November 05, 2014

We’re very effective at creating things at work: new processes, new products, new services, new rules, new standards. These can all be easily made to be fit for purpose – they do exactly what we want them to do.

But when I look at the use of the word culture...