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The Global Brain
Collaborative effort: The next generation of innovation requires bringing others into the fold.
Smart Business Cleveland | May 2008
The Global Brain By Satish Nambisan and
Mohanbir Sawhney Pearson Education,
2008, 276 pages, $29.99
Innovation has historically been confined within a company’s four walls,
where researchers toiled in relative secrecy to develop the next big thing. In
today’s environment of shorter product
life cycles and accelerated competition,
that formula is a prescription for disaster.
Satish Nambisan, a technology management and strategy professor at the Lally
School of Management at
Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, and Mohanbir
Sawhney, the McCormick
Tribune Professor of
Technology and director of the
Center for Research in
Technology and Innovation at
the Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern
University, have written an
intriguing treatise that attempts
to resuscitate the innovation
imperative.
The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for
Innovating Faster and Smarter in a
Networked World makes a compelling
case that creativity requires a diverse mix
of talent and expertise applied in a collaborative and open environment.
“Tapping into the global brain is no
longer a matter of choice,” they write. “It
is more a question of how, rather than
whether, a company should pursue a network-centric innovation strategy.”
Nambisan and Sawhney reveal how
innovative organizations, such as Staples,
IBM, and Apple, reach out to customers,
suppliers, amateur inventors and
researchers.
One example is the Human Genome
Project (HGP), the international research
initiative that aimed to identify and
sequence some 25,000 genes that make up
human DNA. The effort unleashed the creative power of networked communities and pooled resources
to produce extraordinary results.
Perhaps more important, the
authors maintain, was “the sociological perspective of knowledge
creation — that is, the notion of
building on each other’s ideas
through interactions — is fundamental to contemporary innovation contexts, which often
involve highly complex and
diverse sets of knowledge.”
They also take us behind the
scenes at Staples, which holds an idea
contest called InventionQuest, where
individual inventors are invited to submit their ideas, and winning ideas are
commercialized.
By illustrating an applicable structure,
the authors provide an insightful road
map on how to structure emerging network-centric innovation in terms of governance (to ensure common behavior patterns and coordinate information sharing),
knowledge management (to facilitate the
generation, codification and utilization of
information) and intellectual property (to
enable innovators to control the innovation and its derivatives). <<
Lessons learned
1. According to the authors, the search for innovative ideas and technologies has moved
beyond the boundaries of any single company’s walls.
2. Cutting-edge organizations have recognized the innovative power of collaboration by
reaching out to nontraditional sources, such as customers, suppliers and the general
community in the quest to uncover new product and service ideas.
3. Network-centric innovation opportunities have resulted in major breakthroughs where
conventional, proprietary, guarded research has stalled.
4. The next generation of innovation is being achieved by building on numerous sources’
ideas through continuous interaction while, at the same time, developing ways to control
— and commercialize — the resulting intellectual property.
Capsule review provided by Soundview Executive Book Summaries.
