Ian Kennedy – Collaboration in an Open Innovation World, Cisco systems [Thinking digital session notes]

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How relatively small organizations could grow so quickly to overtake traditional organization? There are two different styles of innovation: open and closed innovation model. Closed model assumes they can go and hire all the smart PhD’s and other individuals.

About 3% of any national population is “smart”, “clever” – entrepreneurs, innovators, people who will make a market difference. This equate in US to about 9 million people. China would then have 39 million of smart people. This is so many people that it’s not possible for organization to retain them all – the need for open collaboration model arrises.

From this follows the need for collaboration and sharing on a level of a personal face to face contact. So what we can do about this in virtual worlds, without getting lost in the hype of Second life? It still is a very interesting collaborative space.

World Economic Forum in Davos had a main topic of Collaborative Innovation. The appearance of co-competition is one of the trends – the fact that you can compete and work together at the same time.

Some interesting statistics about timeframe in online world:

• 2 weeks – Time it takes to build trust in the e-world
• 4 times – As long to communicate a message electronically than face to face
• 64% – of communication is non-verbal. Visual cues messages can be easily interpreted
• 17 weeks – time lag for culturally diverse teams to begin outperforming single-culture teams

Tele-presence system, that is not a video-conferecing system. It’s a system to be remote from somebody but it feels like they would sit across the table. The idea is to start building these system and bring in remote people. While the technology is not trying to solve the problem of speed of light, they can optimize the software and hardware part of equation. They have proof-of-concepts using HD televisions that are good enough to use and be a good experience. Possible usage of the technology is to add a HD camera to the TV and just be collaborative over the system. This has important implications for health.