I am listening to a Harvard Business Review Podcast from February with the author of Wikinomics. I am and have always been, fascinated with cross company, cross industry on line collaboration - kind of an "open source" business development in the model of Linux or other on line Wiki's. The author discusses how this is a new way of collecting information and learning. I agree.
The tough thing is, like all destructive technologies and processes, the establishment powers cannot understand it and therefore are afraid of it. They shut it down. In my own company we have been warned of sharing information on open source areas such as blogs and learning communities. I cannot figure this out. Why would they be against this? Of course, you do not trade IP (Intellectual Property) and Trade secrets but collaborating on problem solving seems to me to be something the company should encourage. Let's face it, every company ends up with "cult like cultures" where new ideas tend to be crushed into "company form".
What companies should be encouraging is "open source" collaboration with other industries, other companies, academics and other sources of good information. Most problems are not what I call "physics" questions - meaning the right answer is not out there just waiting to be discovered. Rather, most complex business questions get answered through a string of activities that all come together and gel into a "form" which has an infinite number of components. It is for this reason, collaboration is critical. It is virtually impossible to copy the "DNA" which is created by this collaboration.
Like all ideas coming from the web, Wiki knowledge will run through the normal life cycle. It will be used by hobbyists, then forward thinking young business professionals (at this stage it is feared and much maligned by the old guard of business), then the old guard will start to lighten up, and finally it will become mainstream and the old guard will adopt it as an invention they created.
It is precisely at this point that the hobbyists will be creating the next disruptive technology or process which the old guard, predictably, will fear and malign. And so goes the circle of life!
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