I was reminded on a nice reason to have internal (and maybe external) collaboration communities. Failure. I am a fan of failure. I am a HUGE fan of success. Having entrepreneurial blood flowing through my veins and having run my own business, I have done my fair share of it. I do much less of it these days because I have learned some pretty decent lessons. Often my failures weren’t cheap. In many companies today, failure isn’t an option so I pose that if failure isn’t an option then innovation is either. Some of the best ideas in the world have come from failures; most notably the Post It Note.
When companies invest and grow through social business software, they enable employees who might have been hesitant to stick their neck out on an idea to do so. Knowing, good or bad, its ok to try. Its OK to hit a roadblock. With these come routes to more efficient work and solutions. But part of being in this social community is also holding up your end of the social compact: nurturing others ideas, helping when you can and embrace their success and failure.
I am also reminded as I am sitting on a flight next to the Division 3 National Champs in B-Ball, University of St Thomas Tommies, that each year I get interviewed a couple times by students looking for ways to be an entrepreneur (or a better one) and I alway say – fail. Then I say, learn and fail again. Sometimes you don’t get it right the first time and then next time is the home-run (see: Facebook).
Failure and success is one thing but today, they are increasingly cheap to do so. The barrier to entry is very low. For companies they can get on LotusLive, Jive and other platforms for a pittance and start working. You can build an application overnight on Force.com, Amazon’s EC2 or Google Apps and that idea can go to a market in no time – trust me it works. I wrote an implant registration and tracking platform/app on Force.com in 22 hours (a Friday) and the company had it to production the following Friday. Open platforms, free development environments (and scalable no less), and a social way to test it out – all for less than $20 out of pocket for a skilled person. For just the non-technical you can head to Quora.com to see what the crowd thinks of your idea (if its a great idea, spend a couple hundred and get your provisional patent/trademark). As a company, you can create your internal Quora through a forum or ideation management tool like IdeaJam – all within your firewall.
In closing, whether you are a company like Ford who uses a 24 hours to innovation model or just a startup, its important to be able to Fail: Big, Fast and Cheap. Today, you have the perfect storm of resources, socialability of ideas and the acceptance of success and failure in one breath. As my english prof said: “Come to the edge of the abyss and let me tell you a story” – its not a scary as you thought.
