Paper makes Social Science Research Network's top 10 downloads

My co-author of a paper I presented at an Intellectual capital conference in Matera, Italy last year posted the paper up on the SSRN web site last week. I haven't had a paper posted there before so I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email to say it was in the top 10 downloads. The paper is entitled "The Role of Corporate Social Capital on Business Innovation Networks" and is available for free download here.

Hargraves Innovation Conference 2009

The Hargraves Institute is a think tank comprised of member organisations committed to success through innovation. I was fortunate enough to be invited to provide a keynote speech at their conference this year. The conference was well attended with over 200 registrants, demonstrating that despite the current financial climate, innovation is seen as critical to both survival and thriving longer term. In fact as Optimice we played a more active role than previously. My business partner, Cai Kjaer, conducted a short interest profile of the registrants and then created a large affinity map showing how the registrants were related to each other via common interests. The map was a huge success and a real conversation piece. We intend to replicate this for other events now.

On the conference itself I was pleased to see that networks figured prominantly and that many of the 1st day speakers provided an excellent entre to my own opening speech for day 2. Narelle Kennedy from the Australian Business Foundation reported on a significant research study on common attributes of a successful innovation. The critical elements like being people centric, people networks, tacit knowledge flows etc.. aligned wonderfully with my own topic on trust networks and the speed of trust in innovation.

Daryl Mann from Systematic Innovations spoke of innovations occurring at the point of contradiction i.e. solutions that solve contradictions tend to be the most successful innovations. Daryl noted that the ipod had demonstrated this and did not require major market research to achieve this. I view organisational network analysis as solving the contradiction between top down and peer to peer management.

John Russell from Russell Mineral Equipment gave a very earthy (excuse the pun) talk on how his company had achieved award winning innovations. Of note to me was the critical innovation brokering role that his chief engineer played. The chief engineer has no direct reports yet is one of the highest paid employees that he has. Congratulations to John for recognising the value of the broker/bridge.

This is just a snippet of all the good talks and discussion had. Congratulations to Hargraves for anothe wonderful conference and learning experience. We should have both my own and Cai's presentations up on our web site shortly. The talks were all filmed by Hargraves so perhaps you will also have access to this online soon.

Culture Surveys and ONA surveys

I am currently reading Rob Cross (with Robert Thomas) on "Driving Results through Social Networks" which is basically the cumulative experiences from his Networks Roundtable activities. He has a piece on ONA and cultural surveys which resonated with me. He observed, as we all have, that the culture or engagement survey results tend to average out the extremes (and potentially the most interesting) perspectives. The survey results usually can be "cut" by department, giving those departmental leaders some localised insight. The problem that Rob alludes to is that this only gives a top down, formal organisation view. It basically tells us how well we are engaged with the management and executive or direct report staff in a top down sense. Nothing about cross-wise employee engagement. Now an interesting idea (which I intend to explore) is that if we team an ONA survey with a staff engagement/culture survey and then "cut" the data by those who are in the "key influencers" sector as identified in the ONA.... how powerful would that be? Are our key influencers culturally aligned?. We could do the same for other network roles like bridges/brokers and peripheral specialists. I suspect that the outliers may not get averaged out this time and the value from the exercises could be significantly enhanced.

Maybe I'm just starting to "get" twitter?

I've been mostly a bemused twitterer, been the suject of a twitpic, and in common with most others saying "what is the point?" . I have been reluctant to connect twitter to my iphone in case I get floooded with irrelevant tweets. However on reading this "how to" brief , I get the idea is not so much to say "what am I doing"... which I expect many aren't too interested in, but to ask questions that trigger interaction. OK but what can you find out in 140 characters? Finally I saw a note from David Snowden on how he used twitter and I can see now that when one has generated a truck load of followers you can put them to use by asking them anything! Given a choice we would all probably like to use a human search engine because we tend to get qualifications on the information. One problem though .... would you want to follow someone who keeps asking you irrelevant questions like "what time does the next bus come". I guess Twitter might let you segment your followers .... but that starting to sound like hard work!