Social technologies can bridge distance to help us invent a more sustainable future.
In 2006, Andrew McAfee, then a professor at Harvard (he's now at MIT), coined the expression “Enterprise 2.0” to describe the use of the internet’s emerging collaborative tools, such as wikis and blogs, as channels for unleashing creativity and innovation within organisations.
McAfee suggested that barriers to innovation result when people with ideas are hindered by distance or hierarchy, or simply by not knowing who is who, or even that each other exist.
Innovation seldom has a single parent, but companies typically fail if they put a team in a laboratory and tell its members to invent the future. Instead, McAfee says successful innovation invariably results from the clashes of worldviews between those working in different disciplines, and chance insights borne of surprise conversations and unanticipated interactions.
Social technologies, he says, create the space for such encounters of chance, and smart businesses must learn to use them for this purpose.
Solving sustainability’s problems is a perfect fit because the answers to its challenges’ demand fundamentally new thinking will never come from doing what we’ve always done.
In 2006, Andrew McAfee, then a professor at Harvard (he's now at MIT), coined the expression “Enterprise 2.0” to describe the use of the internet’s emerging collaborative tools, such as wikis and blogs, as channels for unleashing creativity and innovation within organisations.
McAfee suggested that barriers to innovation result when people with ideas are hindered by distance or hierarchy, or simply by not knowing who is who, or even that each other exist.
Innovation seldom has a single parent, but companies typically fail if they put a team in a laboratory and tell its members to invent the future. Instead, McAfee says successful innovation invariably results from the clashes of worldviews between those working in different disciplines, and chance insights borne of surprise conversations and unanticipated interactions.
Social technologies, he says, create the space for such encounters of chance, and smart businesses must learn to use them for this purpose.
Solving sustainability’s problems is a perfect fit because the answers to its challenges’ demand fundamentally new thinking will never come from doing what we’ve always done.
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