One of the very interesting events that will be part of Toronto Tech Week is Enterprise 2.0. In the words of Thomas Purves, one of the organizers of the event:
The plan is to bring together the worlds of the leading minds from the technology and consulting side of Enterprise2.0 with business leaders (CxO’s, executives and IT/HR professionals) to bring a practical and real-world perspective to these ideas.
Sounds very interesting indeed. From what I can see in Wikipedia, the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by someone from Harvard Business School and refers to the use of social networking stuff in the enterprise – i.e. Web 2.0 as applied to business – just to be clear, not as a business, but applied to business.
I was chatting with Mark Kuznicki who mentioned a great example of this described in Wikinomics – Goldcorp and how it took social networking and open-source type tactics to develop a very interesting approach (and very rewarding and profitable solution) to difficulties it had faced. I can’t do the topic justice here – check out the book or have a chat with Mark – its quite an interesting tale.
Similarly compelling tales can be found in a recent article in Wired on crowdsourcing, which I found very, very compelling. Take a look at Eli Lilly’s InnoCentive program or Marketocracy, both of which are mentioned in the Wired article – pretty tough to argue with the results.
So, if you’re a business person, this event would be well worth your time. So go. Then please try to convince the powers that be at my firm to adopt some of this stuff!
Just noted one quote from Wired that I thought captured one of the principles quite nicely:
4. The crowd produces mostly crap
Networks like InnoCentive, Mechanical Turk, and iStockphoto don’t increase the amount of talent – they make it possible to find and leverage that talent. Any open call for submissions – whether for scientific solutions, new product designs, or funny home videos – will elicit mostly junk. Smart companies install cheap, effective filters to separate the wheat from the chaff.