Yesterday’s collaboration tools sought to replicate; today’s intend to innovate.

Imagine being able to sidestep the negative “gatekeepers” in your organization – those naysayers who prematurely reject good ideas and act as communications choke points. The new generation of collaboration technologies promises to do just that.

Fresh collaboration tools have been incubating in the past few years, not in the labs of conventional collaboration-software companies, but rather on popular networking Web sites like Wikipedia and Facebook. The tools on such sites offer inventive ways to bring people together to share ideas and, ideally, to help the cream rise to the top.

Businesses and government organizations are just now realizing that these tools constitute a new breed of killer applications, with potential to help ideas flow more easily and faster throughout the enterprise.

Transcending the goal of merely emulating personal interaction, the tools represent a novel way of collaborating – one that can provide a fertile staging ground for innovation.

R&D, product development, strategy and marketing all stand to benefit. Good ideas will be able to bypass choke points, getting earlier airing and refinement, and not-so-promising ideas will get more quickly culled.

From Telepresence to Innovation
Like the automobile with its initial image as a “horseless carriage,” collaboration technology has been pigeonholed as a mere enabler of communications.

Early collaboration took place through personal meetings, office memos, U.S. mail and informal conversations at the proverbial water cooler. Then the pace of business quickened with groundbreaking technologies like fax, e-mail, workflow software and conference calls. Communications moved more smoothly and freely across geographies and time zones.

But the enabling technologies for those communications were seen simply as an electronification of existing interaction. The holy grail of collaborative technologies was “telepresence” – mundane virtual co-location and face time.

Fast-forward to today’s Web-based applications such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), wikis, Facebook and Twitter. These tools have created new and better ways of working and interacting that simply were not possible or feasible through traditional means.

Put to optimum use, these technologies are both tactical and strategic. By systematically introducing them to support collaborative processes, companies can improve communication among knowledge workers, not to mention reduce time spent reading and responding to e-mails.
More important, they can dramatically improve their capacity for innovation. How? First, by focusing attention on two key attributes of forward-looking collaboration:

n Reach – People can easily identify and effectively collaborate with the right people wherever they are, both geographically and organizationally.
n Awareness – Collaborators can achieve a high level of information-flow continuity.

Tools for Expanding Reach
To understand the vast potential of expanding reach, consider Wikipedia. With content created entirely by volunteers, Wikipedia is now the ninth most-visited site on the Web. It gives individuals anywhere in the world the ability to collaboratively create content with tens, sometimes hundreds, of others.

Of course, traditional word processing and e-mail have allowed people to create and refine projects together for some time. What’s different about wikis (the technology underlying Wikipedia) is that the contributors aren’t predetermined. Collaboration takes shape in an open forum, visible to all; anyone with expertise in a subject area can contribute. Groups easily get introduced to new contributors; contributors easily find new collaboration opportunities. The reach of both parties expands in relation to available expertise.

When executed well, ever-expanding reach can shower collaborators with creative ideas and deep resources. Needless to say, the open collaboration model offers a wealth of possibilities for the enterprise. But the field is still wide open. Companies have only just begun to embrace wikis as a viable means of collaboration, for instance, although industry analyst Gartner predicts they will become mainstream tools in at least half of all companies by as early as 2009.

Some organizations, including several U.S. government agencies, are using wikis to replace slapdash e-mail interactions with more streamlined and structured collaboration. In one large investment bank, wikis reportedly trimmed e-mail traffic by 75 percent and significantly boosted the efficiency of meetings. No doubt many organizations will find wikis useful for locating implicit knowledge within organizations.

Flickr and YouTube exemplify another type of reach: adding value, respectively, to photo, video and film content created by a stranger. This is done by tagging, or through a list of favorites that can be sent to other users.

Tools for Broadening Awareness
Awareness, the other key focus of new collaboration tools, is embodied in RSS, a way for people to keep up with new developments in their areas of interest. By subscribing to specific topics, blogs, podcasts or news feeds, people don’t have to Web site hop to stay abreast; they simply have new material that gets published in their areas of interest forwarded to them.

Another technique for supporting awareness is Twitter, a social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS (texting between mobile phones) or a Web interface. Subscribers continually contribute microblogs (short messages) about whatever they are doing, which are then channeled to interested parties. Picture a corporation’s globally distributed team “twittering” to ensure members continually stay in the loop, thus fostering steady communication and close collaboration.

Facebook and MySpace, meanwhile, provide a range of mechanisms for increasing both reach and awareness. By building and expanding social networks, these sites help people stay in touch with what’s happening in their respective networks.

Several recent studies have found that a major stumbling block for innovation is poor communication across different organizational units within a company. If indeed the new turbo-tools for collaboration enhance internal communications, they’re likely to foster greater and faster innovation. They’ll allow people to more easily cultivate better ideas and bring them to market – or nix them – at a global pace.

By adding multiple layers of value, the new collaboration tools are poised to do the same thing for creaky telepresence – bridging people, time and space in ways we can’t even predict. One thing is for sure: If embraced prudently and openly, they may fundamentally change the way corporations and government organizations work, innovate and grow.

Kishore S. Swaminathan, the chief scientist at Accenture, is based in Chicago. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it