The Largest Benefit of Collaboration in the Workplace

I believe that the biggest benefit to collaboration in the workplace in today’s market has to be the potential for innovation. In one of my class textbooks Enterprise 2.0 Implementation, it states on page 72: ”In today’s economic arena wherein competition is global and products and services are cheap due to the increasing commercial potentcy of emerging markets, price is no longer an area in which organizations can hope to differentiate themselves. Instead, innovation is the principle means through which organizations can remain competitive.”

I agree with the author here, but I would take it even further and argue that in order to even enter certain markets, companies must have an innovative product or service. In many industries/markets, the barriers to market entry to be the cost leader are very high. I doubt anyone will be able to compete with Walmart as a cost leader, for example, any time soon.  However, one only needs to look at Apple for a good case study on innovation and becoming a market leader in the high-end niche electronics market.  Apple decided to change the focus of its company and drive focus away from just PCs and also into the mobile computing market.  Soon after coming out with the iPhone and iPad Touch, it was able to post its best non-holiday quarter earnings of 1.2 billion in profilts (Q1 FY 2009). In addition, Facebook is another good example.  Facebook started out as just one of many social networking sites. Initially, it was an invitation-only website where members had to be a student at a University in order to access and participate in the site. However, soon after adding a way to “tag” photos of friends and by concentrating on the user experience instead of sponsors Facebook took off, while its competitors, like MySpace, faded in popularity.  That innovative focus boosted the popularity of the website and has driven its succcess even to today (source).  Finally, Spigit is taking advantage of this trend by providing tools for companies to harness "crowdsourcing" in their client's organizations in order to boost opportunities for innovative solutions to problems.  "Spigit’s customers include 26% of the Fortune 100 and 16% of the Fortune 500".

So how does a company foster innovation through collaboration you ask?  Many have argued that innovation occurs in complex environments through social learning networks because the knowledge needed to solve the problem in that domain often spans multiple disciplines or specialties. For example, a paper entitled Interorganizational Collaboration: and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in BioTechnology states “We argue in this paper that when the knowledgebase of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms.”  Also, a white paper by IBM, entitled The new Collaboration: Enabling Innovation, Changing the Workplace, makes a similar point:  ”A company is a group of individuals. No one knows what everyone else knows… The new collaboration can provide a platform for helping the many operate as one because each person can be only a step away from the knowledge that other people have.”

It seems the need for collaboration is here to stay and will only grow increasingly more important in order to gain market leverage in our fast-pasted, highly competitive global economy.  Therefore, the salient question becomes: are you doing enough to foster meaningful collaboration that leads to business value among your employees in your organization?