Dennis McDonald lays out some of the points he’s picked for his consulting in the social software space:
Importance of “viral” promotion (i.e., no drumbeating from top executives — let the users progress on their own).
Importance of making infrastructure available throughout the organization as a standard set of tools.
Ability of social media to make up for some of the natural limitations of large meetings (e.g., less outspoken people tend to do less well in open meeting settings and may not have the same disincentives to participate when using social media).
Natural emergence of experts.
Recognition that knowledge management and knowledge sharing are critical to innovation.
Recognition that creative people are what differentiates one company from another given the comparability of physical and financial assets among competitors.
Need to occasionally prune and archive inactive material in order to to keep things “fresh.”
I like his take so much, especially when he touches on this big overlap between innovation and social software – that’s my line of thinking and my inspiration (see BMID and frogpond).
Martin, thank you very much for your kind comments. Innovation management is definitely an area that interests me and I have posted on that topic on my blog as well (http://www.ddmcd.com/innovation_index.html). My favorite source of thinking about innovation is Phil McKinney’s blog (http://www.philmckinney.com/blog.html).