Innovation Creators and Enterprise Blogs

Rod Boothby of Innovation Creators has published a valuable white paper called Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, a treatise that ultimately argues for the use of enterprise blogs as a means of facilitating innovation creation. He builds up an explanation of what the needs of a company are to foster innovation and offers blogs as a solution that meets those needs.

His initial analysis of how to create and foster innovators was the most interesting part to me (and also the longest—he doesn’t even get to blogs until page 28). His thesis contains many nuggets of wisdom regarding turning innovation into a process and how management can be tuned to optimize idea creation:

Managing well means motivating, which means transferring ownership, knowledge and control

Boothby uses examples from a variety of sources to support his theories. Using a story from Gladwell’s Blink, Boothby advises on how a manager should guide knowledge workers on projects to maximize effectiveness and innovativeness:

1. This is what I want you to do
2. This is why I want you to do it
3. If you cannot accomplish what I asked, here is the big picture of what we as a team are trying to accomplish. Either figure out another way to get your job done, or come to me with ideas about how we can accomplish the strategic goals.
4. This is what our final strategic goal is.

When setting the stage for an environment necessary to generate innovation, Boothby provides the following points necessary to understand how to prevent barriers to innovation:

• Innovation creators need to know who is who
• Innovation creators need to know what is going on
• …
• Innovation creators thrive in an environment that encourages dialog and has true feedback loops - The organization must be culturally primed to accept constant innovation

Boothby’s proposition is that corporations need to improve access to information that lies with workers, and that meaningful communication across the company needs to be improved to allow good ideas to develop and mature.

By the time Boothby proposes the enterprise blog as a solution, the requirements for a remedy have been constructed such that his solution does not come as a surprise (well, since “blog” is in the title I suppose it really shouldn’t be a surprise!). How to engender a corporate culture that accepts internal blogs, however, is an issue that isn’t addressed, nor is the proper way to set up a process to develop and productize ideas generated through the corporate blogosphere. Also, engendering a culture of openness and cooperation/collaboration might need to be learned by some who are used to keeping their expertise close to their chest (knowledge is power and valuable...my knowledge is my power and my value). One step at a time, I suppose; Boothby’s arguments seems logical and aren't lessened by not creating a complete pre-packaged solution.

Google has recently stated that one of the first things that they do with new employees is to set them up with their own internal blog, and I know that other giants of innovation use internal blogs as well for communication. I am setting up a blog system at my research center along with a wiki, the latter perhaps being more useful for access to information that usually lies on individual hard drives and for collaborating on knowledge and idea development. I may post observations in the future on my success with these tools.