There’s a lot of talk about innovation, agility, collective intelligence and enterprise 2.0 but what is it all about?

We believe that innovation, knowledge and agility are key to the success of businesses in this new era of global economics. While geographic location is not an inhibitor anymore for communication, collaboration and sharing of information and knowledge, many companies are still not using the power of the new technologies and possibilities that the internet provides.

Fyronic does exactly that, we help companies harness the power of new technologies and possibilities in collaboration and communication to innovate, become agile and create and use knowledge.

Some explanation:

Innovation :

In short “Innovation is the introduction of new things or methods “(www.dictionary.com).
Or as found on Wikipedia “Innovation may refer to an incremental emergent or radical and revolutionary change in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.”

To innovate you need creativity and knowledge. Oftentimes combining known facts, technology, processes, etc. in new ways lead to innovation. Therefore cultivating creativity in your company and increasing overall use of knowledge can lead to more innovation.

Collective intelligence

“Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals.” (wikipedia, Collective Intelligence) In business it can be understood as the joint intelligence of all people working together (collaborating) for an organisation or company.

The key element is collaboration. There is no collective intelligence if there is no collaboration. In order for a company to benefit from this collective intelligence it needs to create an environment where collaboration becomes easy and natural. Then, through the use of collaboration tools the results of this collective intelligence can be captured and cultivated to the benefit of the whole organisation.

Enterprise 2.0

The term was first used by Assoc. Prof. Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business School). He defines it as follows (this is version 2 of the definition) :

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communicationonline communities. (Wikipedia’s definition). and to form

Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

Examples of Enterprise 2.0

• DrKW’s internal blogs and wikis
• Rite Solutions’ prediction markets
• Enterprise tagging
• R&D departments’ use of Innocentive to find solutions to problems that have been stumping them.
• MK Taxi’s ability to connect mobile phone users in Tokyo directly to the driver of the cab closest to them, bypassing the dispatch center altogether.
• Employee blogs like this one

Not examples of Enterprise 2.0

• Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc.  These are for individuals on the Web, not companies.  Some companies use sites like YouTube for viral and stealth marketing, but let’s explicitly put these activities outside our definition of Enterprise 2.0.
• Most corporate Intranets today.  As discussed earlier, they’re not emergent.
• Groupware and information portals.  Again, these tools don’t facilitate emergence, although this may be starting to change.  Groupware and portals also seem to be less freeform than the Web 2.0 technologies now starting to penetrate the firewall.
• Email and ‘classic’ instant messaging, because transmissions aren’t globally visible or persistent.  Some messaging technologies do ensure that contributions are persistent.”

(From A. McAfee’s blog : http://andrewmcafee.org/2006/05/enterprise_20_version_20/)

Concretely, it is the use of “web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration” (wikipedia, web2.0) in an organisation.
Examples of such applications include wiki’s, blogs, mashups, social-networking sites etc.

Business agility

“Business agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to changes in the business environment…Agility is a concept that incorporates the ideas of flexibility, balance, adaptability, and coordination under one umbrella. In a business context, agility typically refers to the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways.” (wikipedia, Business Agility)

Business agility goes hand in hand with innovation. To cope with the rapidly changing market environment a company needs to be as agile as possible to stay competitive. In order to do that constant innovation is a necessary requirement.