Unless your company has figured out how to enable cultural change and remove bureaucratic barriers, you’re not likely to succeed at open, collaborative innovation. But for manufacturers that are making progress on those key fronts, the good news is that an emerging collection of technologies can help them rapidly form collaboration teams and effectively focus those teams on new product innovation efforts.
A group of social networking startup vendors with unlikely names such as Jive, Spigit, and Vuuch is rolling out cloud-based services that are tailor made for manufacturers that want to enable and track collaborations among individuals from inside and outside the enterprise. At the same time, product lifecycle management software vendors such as Dassault, PTC, and Oracle are beginning to add social networking capabilities to their core PLM platforms, allowing innovation teams to collaborate while sharing real-time access to drawings, simulations, and other design content.
Among the emerging enterprise social networking service providers, Jive Software started focusing in earnest on enabling collaborative innovation in February when the company launched what it calls an Ideation module for its cloud-based Jive Social Business Software. Like consumer-oriented social media services such as Facebook, Jive Social Business Software allows users to create their own profiles and find and follow other users.
But Jive also allows businesses to create private collaboration spaces where invited participants can discuss and develop ideas. The new Ideation module allows participants to vote on ideas, filter ideas by stages, and reward the most active or productive collaborators.