The bottom line from a recent META group article on collaboration states that "Effective collaboration strategies will enable workers and teams to be more productive within processes, with success measured via improvement in process outcomes and more sustained levels of innovation resulting from community insight." (Collaboration: The Future Is Contextual, Process-Centric, and Community-Driven, Delta 2895, 29 April 2004, Mike Gotta)

The link between collaboration and processes is fairly intuitive, so let's focus a bit on the last part of this quote, that asserts that success will be measured via "more sustained levels of innovation resulting from community insight." A key ingredient for success of collaboration iniatives is the ability to create communities. The word community itself comes from the Latin words cum, which means "together", and munus, which means "gift", thus according to Wikipedia, community literally means "to give among each other". Wikipedia goes on to say:

"An even narrower definition of community has to do with the nature of interaction. In community, interaction is informal and spontaneous rather than procedurally formalized (such as in bureaucracy), an end in itself rather than goal-oriented (such as in interest group or advocacy group). The members form tight-knit web-like structure of relations rather than a hierarchical one." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communities)

Tools alone won't entice a group of coworkers to become a community, as proven by a multitude of failed knowledge management projects. Mike Gotta counts off the hurdles to overcome, like "persuading people to work differently, establishing incentives and performance measures that foster greater information sharing and cooperation," but then moves right on to discuss benefits: "Community-building efforts are valuable to create synergies across processes and functional groups."

And the connection between innovation and communities? The short answer is simple: two heads are better than one.

1:05:22 PM