What is the Open Enterprise Innovation Award?

This is an industry salute to the work a case study company has done to embrace collaborative and transformative enterprise 2.0 tools. The winning company will also be given a 10-15 minute presentation on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference keynote stage on June 23, 2009.

This award is tied to the Open Enterprise 2009 research project being hosted on this blog.

Please submit via the form hyperlinked below. Thank you!

I had hoped to interview Dion Hinchcliffe, of Hinchcliffe & Co, back at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, but he turned the tables and interviewed me instead. But I tracked him down this week, and spent some time talking through some issues in enterprise 2.0.

Some highlights:

1. Dion is a treasure trove of case studies, starting with a great story about wiki use spreading in AOL years ago, at the very outset of Web 2.0 adoption in large companies.

2. Regarding adoption of Web 2.0, he quotes Euan Semple, “the easiest way to do this is to do nothing,” meaning that the millenials will pull these technologies into the enterprise. He also points out that since web 2.0 tools are more conversational you have to wait for people to warm up before joining, as opposed to point-and-shoot tools like email.
3. I asked if the specific culture of companies influences adoption. He responded that we should see things that we didn’t expect to see, since these tools lead to emergent benefits. We will see a broad range of responses, since “organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways.”
4. Dion agrees that there is a bimodal division in adoption because of the Econolypse: either companies “circle the wagons” and do nothing new, or else they embrace the crisis as an opportunity to explore lower-cost, web 2.0 alternatives. He cites the Transunion case study published by Socialtext, as an example.
5. Most requested: new ways of collaborating with partners outside the firewall. He thinks that these needs for extra-enterprise collaboration are still unmet, but working “better, faster, better” within the walls of the business is still the fundamental driver for adoption.

A great discussion, and very good advice for tool vendors thinking about positioning their products in this space, as well.

I had the opportunity recently to catch up with Andrew, the person who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″ a few years back. Andrew is a professor at the Harvard Business School, and he has just completed a book on the topic.

The takeaways from the talk with Andrew:

1. The spottiness of adoption is interesting. In some sectors — software development — wikis have become a commonplace platform. But elsewhere, it’s very uneven.

2. Andrew believes that leadership is very important, and often absent where Web 2.0 technologies aren’t being adopted.
3. Andrew believes that Twitter is being more widely adopted where the default is openness.
4. Great anecdote about Tivo, as an example as a better mousetrap that remained a niche tool. Many Web 2.0 tools fall into the 9X Effect, where the proponents overestimate the benefits by a factor of three, and those that haven’t adopted them underestimate by a factor of three.
5. He mentions Euan Semple as an exemplar (see his interview, IT Is Not The Source Of Innovation.)
6. Andrew asked me to look into how companies are exploring the “borders” of tools, how companies avoid (or don’t) building walled gardens.

I will certainly be speaking with Andrew many times in the coming months.