• What technique/tool/strategy have you tried, and then abandoned/adjusted? What was the critical issue?
• What have you learned from other companies about the process of distributed development?
• What are you hoping to do in the future?

Strikingly, no technology tools were mentioned. I know the supporting development and collaboration tools are important to the distributed development model — but tools were not at the heart of these executives’ comments. The focus was instead on organization practices and the motivation and development of the people in their organizations.

When is it worth is to collocate?

• When something is going wrong. One example focused on a situation where two teams were tasked with different parts of project. Instead of focusing on their assigned bit, they become competitive and each designed a prototype of the full model — not an efficient approach (though there could have been innovation benefits if the best of both models were integrated — but certainly not efficient). Solution? Collocating sections of each team with the other. This approach echos one an earlier field study on distributed teams and performance (Babba et al., 2004 pdf).
• When the organizational practice begs for it. Scrum meetings at critical junctures. Certainly many scrum meetings take place in a distributed form, but the energy expected is hard to achieve when portions of the team are up in the middle of the night to participate.
• When you want to learn. One of the execs described how much value his organization had gained from spending time collocated at other organizations. One thought was that this is more likely to go well if you are talking about non-HQ groups (fewer boundaries and concerns to overcome). Idea is that spending a day a week, or a month a year, with another organization will open your eyes to different approaches.

Intentional decision making was another key point in this discussion: Being intentional and explicit about where different tasks are placed; intentional in terms of talent skill set, the career development opportunities provided to the employees, and the life-cycle of the project.

Even without technology examples, this was TOP Management. I expect this panel and audience had a clear vision and control over over their supporting technology options — the interesting discussion for them was for the organizational and people components.

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• Comments by Eugene Lee suggesting that he’s seeing greater transparency in a variety of firms
• Nilofer Merchant’s new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy
• Series of comments at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week — Social media creates transparency, often whether you want it or not — so you better manage it

I covered Eugene’s comments last week. Here I’ll focus on The New How and the E2.0 conference.

The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy

At Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business (where I teach Organizational Design and Technology & Innovation Management), we have the pleasure of Nilofer Merchant being a member of our advisory board, and an alum. I’ve had a chance to talk with Nilofer a time or two and she was kind enough to forward me a early copy of her new book.

In The New How, she provides clear examples (often personal) of the flaws of top-down thinking and how this approach threatens strategy development and implementation. Her “Air Sandwich” is a clear and memorable way to describe the problem (p. 13):

An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle — no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy center filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company.

Transparency is one aspect of modern management that can help us find the rich chewy center.

Everyone is better off when they know why decisions are made with as much accuracy as possible. It gives them an understanding of what matters and provides information on which to base the trade-offs constantly being made at every level. It also boosts buy-in and energy from the organization. When reasons behind decisions are not shared, the decisions can seem arbitrary and possibly self-serving. That is, they may seem like they are made for the good of the decision makers, rather than the good of the organization. (p.63)

Foundations of the “New How”:

• Distribute decision making
• Demand good followership
• Reward co-ownership
• Set clear goals and then improvise
• Be students of the game: “We… know that learning organizations get better over time at innovation, disruptive change management, and operational excellence” (p. 218).

While some of these ideas have been around, this presentation and our current environment may contain the levers that finally make it happen on a grand scale.

The environment is creating a fertile ground for the ideas of The New How. In prior times management had to decide to practice transparency (for example, Open Book Management), but with blogging/social media/greater access to data, employees can create some of their own transparency. This dynamic exists across organizations, not just Silicon Valley regulars. For example, the Enterprise 2.0 session on “Is E2.0 a Crock?” (conclusion is that it’s not) included:

• Jamie Pappas, Manager, Social Media Strategy, EMC
• Bryce Williams, Social Media Consultant, Eli Lilly
• Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton
• Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration, CSC
• Bruce Galinsky, Director IT, Metlife
• Greg Lowe, Social Media Architect/Program Manager, Alcatel-Lucent

This is going to happen. “Culture can lead, so you better find tech ways that work for company goals” (Bryce Williams, Eli Lilly). Management should see transparency as an opportunity rather than a challenge. A well informed organization is better able to perform on every level.

Want more data? Here’s a start: Mendelson (2000) Organizational architecture and success in the information technology industry, Management Science. Using data from 63 business units during 1994-1995, Mendelson looks at how the following dimensions of what he calls “Organizational IQ” impact performance (also provides excellent references to foundational books/article around participation and transparency) excerpts from article:

• Promotion of widespread awareness of new information from the organization’s external environment, including information about markets, new technologies, and changes in customer tastes.
• Co-location of decision rights with the pertinent knowledge, which often implies considerable decentralization of decision authority to lower level managers or front-line employees. This, in turn, requires an incentive system that aligns individual and organizational objectives.
• Practices, technologies, and systems that improve the diffusion of knowledge and information within the organization.
• Reduction of complexity and information overload by focusing on fewer activities.
• Reliance on a network of partners for performing noncore activities, following the same principles that define the intraorganizational IA architecture, but applying them beyond organizational boundaries, across the entire network.

Want more examples?

• Military: “Power to the Edge” (pdf of book) notes that transparency and decision rights being located at the “edge” (where the work happens) are necessary in today’s environments.
• Small Business: Laura Lorber describes the benefits of “An Open Book” in a Feb Wall Street Journal article.

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What’s unique is how this process evolved. He’d scheduled these one-on-one meetings for 30 minutes each and knew that wasn’t much time for people to be thoughtful about their responses — so he posted the list of questions to the company wiki. (A wiki is a website where everyone in the company can post and edit information – and one of Socialtext’s main products.) The idea was to give people a chance to think about the questions before their face-to-face meetings. Eugene didn’t anticipate that given the company’s culture and comfort with social software, like this wiki, that people would just start answering — on the wiki for all to see.

Part of this picture is that Eugene hadn’t come from companies with this kind of transparency. In fact, few companies today are this comfortable with public posts and discussions, and I’m guessing that Cisco and Adobe weren’t during Eugene’s tenure. This public response was a surprise to Eugene: unanticipated, and somewhat unnerving (though he notes that for the Socialtext crew, they wouldn’t have thought of doing it any other way). But here’s the key: Eugene has systems savvy and quickly saw the value of the approach. He didn’t immediately post a recall. He certainly didn’t delete the posts. Instead, he added his own responses.

The wiki posts ended up creating the vision statement (especially the question about what will you be most proud of having done when you leave). There was even a dynamic in that as people were contributing their thoughts, others were “gardening the wiki” — making it a well designed document.

The whole process become something Eugene described as “Getting to Know You 2.0.” Sounds like a beautiful Silicon Valley leadership story. At the time, Eugene notes that it actually felt:

So scary. I’d lost control of the process. How powerful to let that control go…. When you hit a tough spot and need people to do something hard… the trust is enormous… and we make software that helps that.

As a result of the process he was able to prepare a presentation covering: memes, themes, dreams, & seams… what was common, what the aspirations were, and where there were gaps. Getting to Know You 2.0 was a success. It took a combination of technology (the Socialtext platform), organization (a way of working that assumed openness and transparency), and people dimensions (Eugene being accepting of risk, even at this critical juncture with the new company). TOP Management.

This was 2007. Jump forward to the middle of 2009. Eugene got a copy of the book Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. This book, and his Getting to Know You 2.0 story have become part of how he presents Socialtext’s products to other senior leaders. …and sometimes the transition is stunning.

He recalled a recent sales call with a C-level executive at a large, traditional (the kind of place where the conference room’s mahogany cabinets had mahogany handles), East Coast organization. Some departments in the organization had been using Socialtext social software products and now the question was whether the platform should be offered to the whole company. The meeting was expected to be a private one with the exec and Eugene. Instead, the exec’s staff crashed the meeting and were joined by a top IT exec. Possibly rough meeting, and started out very quietly. The C-level didn’t say a word for 40 minutes, but the end of the presentation he says, “I think we should do this.” The IT exec posed concerns and implied that while this might be good for a California company… “what problem will it solve? Implementations fail when there isn’t a problem being solved.” Pause. The C-level then says “Employee engagement, cross department collaboration.” Maybe this firm’s conference rooms were formal, but this gentleman understood the value of transparency in modern organizations.

Eugene says this story has played out similarly in multiple firms. This transition to transparency is happening and technology is helping to manage the process. He sees this as a leadership issue, the technology is only enabling the interactions. Leaders need to consider:

What does it mean to you, the leader, in terms of not killing transparency? How open book is appropriate? How cross functionally transparent do you really want the culture to be?

Technology, organizations, and people — designed together — TOP Management.

Additional material from my interview with Eugene:
Budget as a Trigger for TOP Management: Examples from Eugene Lee of Socialtext

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My university had the honor of hosting a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain, cyberlaw expert and Harvard Law Professor (currently a Visiting Professor at Stanford). His presentation, “Minds for Sale,” focused on “the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” He opened with a pyramid similar to this one:

Each of the organizations in the pyramid uses the Internet to recruit people to do work. At the highest level of Zittrain’s pyramid is InnoCentive, a market for innovation. “Seekers” describe challenges and offer rewards for the solution. Many (most?) of these are serious scientific challenges like this one ($50K reward): “The Seeker is looking for a method to produce a hardened sharp edge from a polymeric, polymer-like, or composite material using a low cost rapid production technology.” At the next level is LiveOps. They also provide a market, but for on-demand call-center workers. LiveOps adds value by training and screening the providers, and then linking providers to companies with call center needs. Mechanical Turk (Amazon) is a self-described “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” This is another market to match tasks and people, but the tasks are smaller and sometimes routine (e.g., creating key words for images, identifying web sites, writing short paragraphs) — many pay just few cents for completion.

The ESP Game and Google Search are fundamentally different. These are not markets for work, but work is still being done. In the ESP Game you look at images and try and guess a keyword that someone else on the Internet is also adding to that image. You get points for correct matches. It’s a game, but a “game with a purpose.” In the case of ESP, Internet search engines will do a better job because of the keywords added by the people playing the game. The matching of the keywords serves as an easy form of quality control.

Then there is Google Search. Zittrain’s comments gave me a context for thinking about how Google benefits from the fruits of my labor. Every time any of us creates a web link (for example, each of the links I use here as a way of providing a reference), we are adding the the intelligence Google’s search engine uses to pick what search results to show. If I, and many others, link to a place to buy Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet, then that link is likely to show up near the top of searches on Zittrain’s name, the keywords/title of the book, etc. We’ve done some of Google’s work for them.

An thus the ordering of the pyramid. At the top are clear job opportunities. With InnoCentive, Seekers and Problem Solvers are actually in contact and can interactively refine the work task. LiveOps doesn’t have a direct connection between the person taking the calls and their temporary employer, but there is an interactive training and evaluation process between the call taker and LiveOps. Mechanical Turk and the ESP Game are both instances where the tasks are broken down into relatively small bites, with commensurate rewards. And finally, our work for Google (and all the other search engines) has no interaction, nor explicit permission to use our labor.

Zittrain’s ideas around “Minds for Sale” is that the Internet enables a whole slew of new ways to work for organizations — sometimes without even knowing that you are working for the organization! His discussion goes into far greater and more sophisticated detail, touching on child labor laws, your rights to carry your reputation with you from one market to another, and privacy. This last raised the issue that without interaction, we may not understand the ultimate consequences of the work we are doing. One of his examples highlighted the possibility for the mass identification of dissenters — you can’t hide in the crowd if thousands of people are available to match international identification pictures with pictures from a protest.

As an Internet optimist, I’m focused on how organizations and workers can find new value from boundaryless organizational forms. Zittrain’s work helps me understand new “people” implications that can result from our integration of technology and organizations. In my consideration of TOP (Technology, Organization, People) Management I generally think of people as relating to skills and capabilities, not human implications. Minds for Sale was of value across the full range TOP issues.

pdf of Zittrain’s paper Ubiquitous Human Computing

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I’m going to start with an example from earlier in his career that may be the easiest for all of us to apply. (I look forward to sharing his “Getting to Know You 2.0″ story in the next week or so.) Eugene had just joined Cisco as VP of marketing for a new business line focused on SMEs [small and medium sized enterprises] and was in one of his first staff meetings with the finance director and other leaders. The presentation went into great detail around financial goals, drill-down goals and the like. Eugene turned to the controller who was helping him through this on-boarding process and asked for more explanation:

The controller was going through the mechanics of headcount, revenue, degrees of freedom, budget, variable marketing spend, allocation stuff… took me through all the lines of a vast spreadsheet. I asked “where’s my IT [information technology] allocation?” “Well, we don’t do that,” says the controller. “Everything is client funded, you decide what you’re going to spend on IT.” At first I didn’t understand.

The major “a ah” was when Eugene realized what it meant in this context that “everything is client funded.” It meant that he had a budget and it was up to him to make choices — across technology, organizations, and people — regarding how he was going to spend the money. This approach created a commitment well beyond that he would expect if there were just an “IT allocation.” It was all about getting the most from your dollar, and getting the most from your dollar doesn’t come from spending on IT independent of the rest of your organizational actions. It has to be a systems approach. It has to be an integration of the technology, the organization, and the people. The budgeting system was a trigger for TOP Management. If you separate out your budget allocations, people will think about the components independently. If instead you budget for a system — you get people to think and design in an integrative way.

I made systems thinking a major part of anything my team did. Raised the bar on what qualified as a fundable program. [Systems thinking] became a theme — and then how we could teach small business to do it at their scale.

The budgeting system also pushed groups across Cisco to collaborate:

Nobody had enough to make a nirvana system on their own, so people would pool resources and you would get alignment across stakeholders. Where the budget comes from plays into creating the conditions, part and parcel, of how the business gets driven.

Eugene said he saw these systems ideas further solidified in how Cisco handled his IT support. The IT Vice President came over to see how he could help. IT: “We need to hire somebody to support your group.” Eugene: “Cool. Who do you have in mind….” IT: “No, you’re going to hire somebody.” The budget money came from IT, but the decisions came from Eugene’s group and the new IT staffer sat (and ate lunch) with Eugene’s team. This “made such a difference. She sat in my building, came to our staff meetings. She could efficiently do the research around what would work and what wouldn’t because she understood the work that needed to get done.”

As a management professor who teaches systems thinking (and hopefully, savvy) in the context of organizational design, these examples sparkled. Cisco had built a budgeting system that clearly supported frugal and effective innovation. Eugene saw it as a way to leverage his resources and this insight served as an effective trigger in his development of systems savvy.

We can all do this — from high corporate finance to departmental budgets — we can use the power of the purse to encourage people to take a systems approach. Managing technology, organizations, and people as a system is likely to be a much more efficient, and effective!, use of limited funds.

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Management scholars have been aware of this since at least the late 50s (the original research was done in coal mines). In 1974, Herbst reiterates that:

..if the technological system is optimized at the expense of the social system, the results achieved will be sub-optimal. The same would be true if the social system were optimized at the expense of the technological system. The aim to be achieved would need to be the joint optimization of the technical and the social systems.

Scholars then (and now) called this approach Sociotechnical Systems Theory. Do you think that a better term would have made the ideas more sticky? Here’s hoping that TOP Management can hold our attention long enough gain some value.

We have some great examples of the effective management of Technology, Organizations, and People from modern organizations (here & here) as well as some poor examples (here & here).

But what can we learn from libraries in the 70s & 80s? That TOP Management matters. Eighty-five public libraries participated in this extensive study. Given the narrow focus of the organization type we can get an especially clear picture of the results. High performing libraries had significantly less “lag” than did low performing libraries. That is, the administrative and technical innovations went more hand-in-hand in the high performing libraries than in the low ones.

Damanpour and Evan give us further insights into the relationship between technical and administrative innovations:

Although the importance of technical innovations cannot be underestimated, the impact of administrative innovations in preparing organizations for new technical changes is all to often underappreciated…. Administrative innovations can change an organization’s climate, communication, interdepartmental relations, personnel policies, and so on. In turn, they provide new opportunities for the initiation and adoption of innovations in the technical system.

Does your organization have lag? Have you seen examples where technology is implemented as a silver bullet, and then organizational practice change follows only when the expected benefits aren’t realized? If your organization doesn’t experience lag — how do you avoid it?

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Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute?

An excerpt of Huggy Rao’s 2008 book Market Rebels and Radical Innovation gave me some great history and insights (video of Prof. Rao talking about book). He points out that automobiles, personal computers, and home brewed beer each had a “hot cause” to arouse emotion and create a community of members, and “cool mobilization” — think jazz “cool” — to signal the identity of members and to sustain their commitment:

• Automobiles had enthusiast organizations with with hot cause goals of shielding owners from legal harassment and solving problems of transportation (this was the late 1800s). The cool mobilization strategies were reliability contests (though some of them seem to have gotten pretty “hot” – women screaming, men stomping on hats…)
• Personal computers had “the tyranny of the central computer” as their hot cause and hobbyist clubs (most famously, the Home Brew Computer Club where the Apple I and many others made their debut) as their cool mobilization.
• Microbrewing and its American Homebrewers Association had the democratization of the production of beer — with the downfall of “industrial beer” (”thin and overcarbonated”) as their hot cause, and home brewing, frequenting brewpubs, and beer festivals as mechanisms for cool mobilization.

I’ve added electric planes to give us thoughts for the future. Electric plane enthusiasts have EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association), the CAFE Foundation, and NASA behind them. While there might not be women screaming and men stomping on hats, there is a $1.5 Million prize “for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon” – and electric power is likely to play a role. Clearly “green” is hot — and NASA is cool.

But such collaboration isn’t natural or easy. In Steve Gillmor’s recent interview with Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and creator of Lotus Notes and Groove), Ozzie says about collaboration:

“… people don’t like to work on things that are joint objectives; they like to work on things that are their key — that satisfy their KPIs [key performance indicators], their objectives, not necessarily the joint ones.”

Rao’s “hot” and “cool” (and his deeper analytic links between radical innovation and insurgency) may be the explanation for our examples of collaborative efforts related to these innovations: the causes were so motivating and the social movements so strong that they did (do) help people meet their own objectives.

Photo by rmhermen

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We had a wonderful discussion and I took away two key points:

• The design/decision process can play a strong role in the application of systems savvy
• Learning from a broad set of life experiences helps to give you the vision to see all of technology, organization, and people dimensions of a situation

The opening question of the interview was “It would help if you could tell me a story or relate to me an experience you have had in which you learned an important lesson about technology, organizations, and people.”  Earl mentioned that the discussion was bringing a smile to his face:

The smile that came to my face is that individuals somehow piece all that together. It wasn’t that I knew that I was doing that…. I grew up as a technology person, but recognized the need for relationships and the ability to deal with all different kinds of people and a process to bring those together.

LSA [the creation of the light sport aircraft regulations] is a great example.  We had a whole series of things — we had a vision — but you need to put all three mechanisms together in a way that we can get the technology and the soft[er side] people together.

Background: New aircraft regulation and pilot licensing is not a simple project. Besides the legal aspect, manufacturers have to design new models to meet the regulations, new training/testing must be prepared, and a new market created.  From the EAA site:

In 2004, the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] created sport pilot/light-sport aircraft (SP/LSA) regulations. The most significant change in FAA regulations in 50 years, it allows easier and lower-cost access for those wishing to participate in the joy of flight. For the past half century, EAA has been a leader in providing people with more opportunities to take to the sky, and for the past 10 years has worked with the FAA on the development of SP/LSA.

He noted that he didn’t set up the process on his own, but instead approached ASTM International (originally known as the American Society for Testing and Materials). He had observed that ASTM had a world class process for community decision making — consensus decision making that brings together key stakeholders (e.g., manufacturers, consumers, regulators, consumer membership organizations).  Earl gave great credit to the ASTM director who facilitated the process — this person seems to have a healthy serving of Systems Savvy (I’ll be trying to catch up with him for a future post).

Earl offered that the decision making process they used made sure that technology, organization, and people realities were each in play.  The manufacturers had clear perspectives on what was technically possible, the regulators brought the realities of safety standards, the consumers (pilots and operators) understood the performance characteristics and price points that would make sense, and Earl and the ASTM facilitator could help the group grow and and weave together the perspectives and needs.  Thus, the interweaving requires the right perspectives to be on the table and a process to bring them together.

But how do people obtain this weaving skill?  I asked Earl where he got his savvy.  Another great story.  Earl’s mom had a catering business that supported several wedding parties every weekend.  Earl worked these weekends starting at age 8 and continuing through college.  Interestingly, he didn’t appreciate this background to his engineering skills until much later when he was an aerospace manufacturing engineer.  Then the lightbulb went off.  At that point,

“I’m not fully the tech guy… not the guy running the machine… I’d go nuts designing a bracket all day long.  My job was to produce the product, keep everybody happy, and I had to work with a whole bunch of people.  Brought cookies.”  Looked out for them.  Kept their interests in mind.

It was then that he realized the perspective he gained from all those weekends with the crying brides [my description, not his].

Many of us have the capability to be savvy along one or two dimensions.  We can take the next step and manage technology, organization, and people dimensions — all three at the same time –  if we can find a process for keeping all three on the table and if we look to our broader experiences to help us see how the pieces might fit together. 

Comments appreciated on your own “broadening” experiences. 

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• Technology has become an underlying utility for our organizational strategies — yet is it constantly in flux
• Organizations are global, partnered with other organizations and more and more run via virtual teams with limited physical interaction
• The people of the organization are more diverse given globalization and crossing generations of vastly different backgrounds

Over the next week or so I’ll provide examples for each category. For today I’ll focus on Technology. Thank you to BL Ochman for providing this example within her post Three Top Ways to Damage Your Brand With Social Media for the blog, SocialMediaToday. Her three points are each examples of using technology without bringing together the organization and the people:

1. Start a Twitter account then don’t use it
2. Don’t track your brand in social media using either free or paid monitoring tools.
3. Start a social media program, but don’t tell the rest of the company about it.

Time Warner provides her examples for points 1 and 2; the small company Uprinting.com provided the example for point 3 — though they acknowledged the problem and seemed to be moving to correct it (the same could not be said for her experience with Time Warner).

The image tells the story of a problem that has not been corrected in the six days since the post: TimeWarnerCares, doesn’t seem to. They have still not used the account and they are still not following any of their followers, who are possibly Time Warner fans. Ochman reports that although she used Twitter to document her service problems – using their Twitter account name – she had no reply in 24 hours. She says, “That’s approximately one week in Internet time.” This suggests that no monitoring is in place.

Time Warner seems to have had someone think that using technology was good — but that person either wasn’t in a position to bring the organization and people onto the project, or they didn’t understand that they should.

Ochman also provides an example of success – and of a success that seems to cover all of TOP Management’s dimensions: Comcast has become famous for their use of the social messaging service Twitter. Frank Eliason, a customer service director, has been using Twitter to support Comcast customers for over a year. BusinessWeek describes him as the most famous customer service manager in the in US, and possibly the world. Monitoring systems are in place at Comcast so they can follow what people are saying about them and/or any problems customers are experiencing. Comcast has developed systems for acting on this information: other customer service reps are available and know how to use the tools.

The moral of the story is that new technologies can be great triggers for innovation — but the use of the technology should be thought through and integrated with organizational practices and employee skills before going live to almost 30 million U.S. users.

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IDEO, Google, PARC, Yahoo! have/had public websites for their “labs”:

• IDEO Labs: “… is a place where we can show bits of what we’re working on, talk about prototyping, and share our excitement over the tools that help us create.”
• Google Labs: “Explore Google’s technology playground”
• PARC Living Laboratory: “In the spirit of open innovation, this is one of the places where PARC scientists and engineers share their prototype web-based services, alpha-stage software downloads, proof-of-concept for various competencies, and collaborative development programs. These are available free to the public for trial and feedback; in turn, we hope to draw on the diverse perspectives the online community will share. We do not currently provide access to inactive projects (e.g., Map Viewer) here.”
• Yahoo! Next: (defunct?) “… is a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and upcoming projects. It is essentially an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, and a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum. The Yahoo! Next website is currently offline for redevelopment” (from Wikipedia.)

These sites provide outsiders with early access to interesting work, and early feedback from enthusiastic followers. To the extent that we are becoming a sharing/collaborative community, these organizations can gain great value and we can participate in the process.

But, how do you make the choice of openness? How do you decide what to be open with and what to keep secret? There is a full range of possibilities (the range of formal arrangements is nicely covered in When is Virtual Virtuous, by Hank Chesbrough and David Teece). They highlight the issues of whether or not the innovation exists, or must be invented; and whether the innovation will be autonomous or systemic to the organization’s goals and processes. Note: you don’t see Google open sourcing their algorithms.

SAP Labs shows a middle ground. They appear to have standard R&D, but with a local and co-innovation flavor:

“The SAP Labs Network leverages SAP’s rich diversity and technical and business expertise to deliver the best software solutions and services in the IT industry.

Located in high-tech centers across the globe, the SAP Labs Network helps SAP engage the local ecosystems and enable co-innovation.

Seen as a local company within a seamless global network, each SAP Labs location increases SAP’s adaptability and agility to rapidly address changing markets and meet evolving customer needs.” (Thanks, @nilofer for the example.)

Here’s a twist: Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute? I have a couple of examples and will do a follow up post — but it would be wonderful if you could share any examples you have. These can be self-organizing (like much of the open source software), facilitated by membership enthusiast organizations, or….

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