In

Kelley describes 10 constructive roles team members can play to spur, nurture, and demonstrate innovation. Near and dear to my heart are the "collaborators" who "Stir up the pot. They bring people together to get things done."  Collaborators help create new partnerships, inspire new forms of learning, organize teams in creative ways, and build investment and support for new ideas.

I was particularly pleased to read Kelley's description of the collaborative technology they use.  He says:

IDEO has split its business into practices, deemphasizing geography and recognizing our global capabilities... we build e-rooms, virtual spaces dedicated to projects carved out on the company's digital network.  Team members make and manipulate a project-specific Wiki... We often do Web-enabled meetings, where we are all looking at the same presentation documents.  (p. 132)

Forum One's ProjectSpaces team management tool is an excellent platform for virtual innovation spaces like Kelley describes.  It allows team members to share ideas, organize work, brainstorm, and keep organized despite geographic location or time zone.  For our work we pair ProjectSpaces with instant messaging (so we have team "presence" and direct access to one another) and have been using ASAP for web conferencing. 

Certainly, successful collaborators should have a suite of online collaboration tools in their toolboxes and need to know how to use them.

I've spent time the last couple of weeks writing an editorial for CXO about what the Online Collaboration Revolution means to the global economy.  I realized two things from this exercise.  First, it explained why I finally left grad school -- it was very painful to put down ideas in a format longer than an email.  Second, the Collaboration Revolution is real and very exciting.

The thesis of the editorial is that online collaboration will do for the information revolution what the assembly line did for the industrial revolution.  It will dramatically increase the productivity of knowledge workers, value different skills, and ultimately change the character of work.

We already see new collaborative tools changing our work.  Ranging from instant messaging (I can't imagine Forum One without AIM), to web conferencing, to workspaces like ProjectSpaces, these tools are being adopted and affecting our work style, location, team composition, and products.

The impact on the economy will be tremendous.  We'll see new methods of knowledge creation and decision-making, faster and more dramatic innovation, changes in the role of government, and new kinds of working relationships.

The assembly line increased demand for unskilled labor and tended to create a very long, regimented work day.  I'm optimistic that the changes brought about by the collaboration revolution will tend to be positive for a very large segment of the population.  Work will be more interesting, more inclusive, and more flexible while the economy will grow faster and become more efficient with widespread benefits.

This is a topic I'll be coming back to for some time to come.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it on The Daily Show with my own eyes (and then confirmed it with the Houston Chronicle and, still not believing, the BBC).  Texas Gov. Perry has called for a massive online collaborative effort to protect the Texas border.  He wants to spend $5 million to create the "Virtual Border Watch Program" installing surveillance webcams (with night vision) so that people from around the world can help guard the Texas border.  The Chronical reports that "People who witness suspicious actions, including crossings, will be able to call a toll-free number to report it to the authorities."

Keywords: Collaboration