‘Collaboration’ is a word that is being thrown around the global playground of work presently. As a word it is overused, but as a concept it is underutilised in many ways. Frankly, most of us mistake ‘collaboration’ for ‘partnership’ or ‘strategic alliance’. So why is this word that is difficult to say when you have had a glass of wine or two becoming common terminology in offices, laboratories, factories, studios and even whole fields across the globe?

Over the last 30 years we have slowly moved from organising and re-organising production systems, industrial relations, factories and procedures to understanding and facilitating ideas that are shared and developed using collaborative methods that we still do not understand the power of. The most significant catalyst has been mass adoption of the web, in the western world at least. Not only has it removed geography, it is enabling mass participation and mass innovation.

Seth Godin talks incessantly about being remarkable using his ‘purple cow’ as an example of how different we now need to be to stand out in the crowd. Talking to a friend the other day stimulated me into thinking how this is working at the moment!

His remark about being remarkable was that he, well wasn’t, remarkable. What tosh! We are all remarkable in a unique, special and unusual way. It’s true a lot of us spend a lifetime trying to discover what it is and some of us are especially luck and find it early in our lives. Whatever, the fact remains we are each and every one of us remarkable.

The trouble is that if you’re remarkable at something that isn’t work orientated, or you don’t think you are remarkable! What happens if what you do, lots of others are doing too? The abundance/scarcity issue again! There are plenty of examples. What do you do then? Well latch onto, work with, co create, piggy back someone who can make a career out of being remarkable and by being beside them it will rub off, motivate, inspire and above all bring happiness, not to mention the income that you deserve!

Our approach to innovation and creativity is changing in a new environment. We can create new things quicker than ever before, we can get that new product to market around the world with almost the snap of the finger and, we can via websites, market that product instantaneously.

This means new approaches, flexible processes and an openness to ideas creation many of us feel more than a little uncomfortable with. In the future, we will be creating and building communities around ideas and themes our brand is interested in and associated with. I envisage the demise of the traditional customer relationship management system. It being replaced with several ‘live’ platforms that are populated by our user base, some of which we will own and others, like Facebook, we will not.

With the development of the Internet, broadband and social networking, we can experiment, collect and curate significant communities of users who can help us create and undoubtedly play. This will mean a huge shift from the days of ‘closed innovation’ to ‘open innovation.’ This new emphasis will require new skills; facilitation and enablement, mobilising gatherings, connecting people within and across communities, providing offline and online platforms for connection and encouraging cross-functional innovation.

At their best these communities assembled around our brand will become self-organising systems. We won’t totally control the generation of our next product offering but we may facilitate the process to get it to market. There will be little timeline between design and installation/implementation. There will be fewer product/service failures, as the user group will have created it. As we grow towards mass innovation as Charles Leadbeater suggests, we will perhaps head onwards to ‘mass customisation.’

For all of this to be successful we are going to have to unlearn a lot of stuff. Become open, transparent, understand that control and power has shifted and use leadership skills rather than management ones. For it to work, we will need to be highly engaged with those communities, trusting, honest and energetic.

Innovation will not be the rigid process it was before, only arising internally in our organisation. It will increasingly and abruptly rear its head as a small community of users shout ‘eureka’ and then expect us very quickly to get it to market. So as well as recruiting ideas people, we’ll need to recruit people who can really curate these business communities by gently, subtlety and gracefully guiding them towards true and successful innovation for your brand.

Word provided by Scott Gould – www.scottgould.me

If you help, what I contribute will be better. Value, in the future for a lot of people, will be whether and how they participate in the businesses we run. They will be particularly motivated by group effort. Participation has almost become risk free because the cost of failure has dropped so we can mass innovate. The tools are there and the hierarchy removed to allow us to all to really take part.

Humans have always had a desire to make meaningful contributions. We lost that. Businesses deliberately organised themselves to control the participating. However, the case studies of Wikipedia and Linux have altered how close the horizon is. Participation is changing the way companies use resources and it’s bridged the gap between the amateur and professional. Amateurs are collecting data on behalf of wildlife trusts, we can transmit news items to the media, and astronomers are listening for other life forms for governments.

The passive consumer is evaporating. We want to participate in the generation of new products and services. We no longer want to just wait for it down the line to be delivered. Charles Leadbeater talks about “mass production to mass innovation.” He has missed a process or two out of the equation. It’s more like this:

Mass production – Mass participation – Mass collaboration – Mass innovation

It’s just a thought. As companies we have misunderstood that it’s the non-financial, intrinsic factors that motivate people like participation more than the financial ones. We are always talking about the difficulties of getting customers and employees to understand what we do and the advantages of our product. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I might remember, involve me and I will understand.” Powerful stuff. Maybe participation gets rid of that communication problem we have been having?

We have no excuses anymore. All business can allow its customers and employees to participate. I’m not talking about amateurs doing brain surgery, not a great idea, I agree. But I am talking about using the social tools we have now to enable the impossible to be achieved. If we involve people in the process, they take ownership. From that they will easily become part of our community, which is where we need them to be in the future.

Innovation comes from freedom to find, not from obeying someone else’s orders. Future talent will demand autonomy and this goes past the simple solutions of the past such as empowerment and being allowed to use initiative. For those that are really talented, will not relinquish their abilities in a career limiting move and hide behind a subordinate role being told what to do.

In the future you will pay people based on their value, on their financial and non financial contribution to your business, not whether they rocked up and worked a 60 hour week. Work is changing. Its become more challenging, more sophisticated, more time pressured, more collaborative, more engaging, more equal, more technological and less reliant on control, command and power. Companies are having to change their decision making processes, their reward structures and abandon their heirarchy.

It means opening up. It is becoming increasing less productive to make decisions in isolation, since in the future, it will require so many different specialists from niche areas to support those problem solving solutions. Its a blinding flash of the obvious but a group of people, almost always, will have more knowledge and expertise than any individual. Future success will depend on leaders being able to pull together and engage the talents of a cross functional nature from inside and outside the organisation.

This type of working increases opportunities to add value but they will bring about significant changes in business infrastructure including, co ordinating people on and off the payroll as well as co creating products.

With the advent of digitalisation we are faced with unparalleled shifts in how we work when it comes to research, development and the production of new products/services. We will increasingly need to develop ways of joint working where the boundaries move and change like an amoeba. Bringing new and remarkable things to market now means working with a diverse and flexible group of partners with complementary skills and capabilities.

Collaborative research and development is nothing new, academia have been doing it for years. Neither is product development, car manufacturers like BMW are accomplished after years of experience. However, as the playing field flattens so too other companies have to make the significant jump. Traditional thinking argues that the knowledge, information and ideas a company has must be kept in house. When people start sharing that knowledge or remixing it, companies get nervous and, in the worst cases, call in the lawyers.

That’s just not going to work in today’s networked economy. Technology has collapsed the cost of innovation in almost all sectors, even pharmaceuticals. Its simple to become self organised and easy to connect across the world with people who can fill the gaps in your skills matrix. Technology has acted as a catalyst for widening the distribution of knowledge and information and as a result business is been done via a set of very different principles.

We can’t afford all of the talent and the talent doesn’t necessarily want to work for us, on a permanent basis anyway. Research and development is an imperative part of a companies arsenal of competitiveness. As I’ve said before, those that innovate regularly will find themselves shaping the future. Collaborative working will be at the heart of that and that will demand a whole different set of leadership behaviours and attitude. Another reason command and control is dead!