The opportunity for customers or competitors to get the jump on new innovations in your area of business increases daily.
I dislike using large company examples but P&G is worth being inspired by.
P&G transformed itself from a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine. In 2000, it found itself isolated from the networks that were creating value in their field, and unable to keep up with rising marketplace demands for growth and innovation.Its CEO led the company on an ambitious campaign to restore greatness by sourcing up to 50% of its new innovations from outside the company (InnoCentive, NineSigma, yet2.com, etc).
Today P&G is a leader among thousands of companies that participate in a global exchange of ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds (Check out Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics for more examples). Companies that move now can leverage this huge pool that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.
How can you get with the program?
The starting point for any leader is personal use of the new collaborative technologies, preferably in conjunction with a recent young hire (mentor up). Ask your son or daughter to get you on Facebook, MySpace, Ning. Edit a page in Wikipedia. Create a video clip for YouTube. Start an internal blog. Get a taste for how these open communities work.
The next step is to plan your learning ecosystem. This is not a traditional competitive landscape or value-chain analysis but an analysis of the participants creating knowledge pertinent to your existing and future business. This can include employees, business partners, customers, academia, public research institutes, communities of practice, consultants and contract research organizations…all the relevant disciplines that intersect with your strategy.
The hard part, I guess, is rewiring our brains and turning off old business reflexes.