Why go for collaborative networking in your organisation?

If you ask a believer, the answer is not the same as that of the average CEO. A believer sees the common good of finding kindred spirits, sharing information and exploring new ventures. Innovation through friction within multidisciplinary teams is a given. Therefore, this is automatically going to conquer the world! Where have we heard that before? A CEO on the other hand needs to be convinced that what we do leads to more revenue, higher margins, or lower costs.

One can only achieve any of these targets by increasing efficiency and/or effectiveness. By not only doing things better, but also by doing better things. Deliver products at a better price/quality level, with better service, et cetera. So far, we have gone down the 'Economies of scale' road. Continuously lowering transaction and interaction costs relative to the number of products/services we produce. The problem is that the knife we're using to cut costs has become more expensive than the costs we are cutting. Especially large firms have compartmentalized their organizations and departments into small dependent units that are extremely efficient at what they do, but have no clue anymore about the outside world while still being dependent on that outside world. So when something happens outside their scope, they act within their limited set of rules. Result; service goes down, a whole batch of products contains mistakes, et cetera. Only the board still sees the big picture and so the board constantly has to step in to set details straight and change the rule set to accommodate incidents. See where this is going?

What we offer through collaborative networking is the ‘Economies of Scope’ way. Not a magic bullet, but a means for your employees to come together, learn from each other and by achieving new insights together, innovate. We let people from different disciplines meet around objects (products) or subjects (service level) and get to understand each other's differing view points on the same matter. This is the basis for creating new insights and in turn is the basis for innovation. Not only do they come up with innovations, but as a multi disciplinary team are also much better equipped to come up with the goods to prove it; a solid business case. Because we are going to support network activities through web based tools, we not only support the current team, but also the rapid inclusion of new members and a means to research the behaviour expressed and together with the University of Twente and the Institute for Network Cultures accommodate the tools to better meet those needs in the future.

Does this mean a CEO can sit back and relax? By no means! He or she has to show commitment to this way of working and reward co-operation and resulting success. Real leadership is needed to motivate the networks to produce and give direction to where they are going. In this sense, nothing has changed; we still need people to inspire us!