Aspects of Enterprise 2.0
In a recent article about Enterprise 2.0 I discovered some interesting aspects on the effectiveness of social networks: companies using external collective intelligence to drive their innovation. In March 2000 Canadian gold mine company Goldcorp Inc. put 400MB of geological data on the internet which described a 200 square km sized area. Under the name of "Goldcorp Challenge" everyone could do data analysis and give hints about potential gold prospects. The community identified 110 spots out of which 50% were not known by the company before and finally at 80% of these gold was found. Over $500.000 were paid as prizes.
What made this idea so effective is that not only a lot of people worked on the problem but it were people with many different backgrounds, not only Geologists, also Army Officers, Mathematicians, Physicians, all of them using different techniques to solve the problem. The more people contribute and look at a problem from different angles the higher the probability to find a solution.
There are web based communities matching top scientists to specific R&D challenges, like Innocentive used by Procter and Gamble. They cut their own investment in product development by 50%. There are other examples of how to reduce service cost by delegating queries to "Service Communities" in which two thirds of them were solved by users helping themselves.
Also interesting is the use of virtual worlds like Second Life or There.com in business context. Human minds are more attentive to interaction in 3 dimensional spaces and therefor in an enterprise these are currently used for communication (e.g. virtual meetings), learning (e.g. flight simulator), marketing (e.g. the Dell shop in Second Life or a virtual data center which can be used to explain the efficiency of complex products), product development (e.g. 3 dimensional models of a new car prototype) and for the control and simulation of business, production or logistical processes. Also Sun bought land in Second Life and was the first Fortune 500 company back in October last year to hold a press conference there!
The technology is there and is improving every day, just a question of time to see new business models popping up based on it.
Posted at
08:11AM Jul 02, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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