
How does open source affect company culture?
An open source company is naturally a company that produces open source code for others to consume. But how does the notion of producing software code in the open affect company culture?
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Game Changing Customer Support Communities (Presentation)
The following was the Presentation I gave at the Gilbane Conference in Boston Self-Service support communities are beginning to replace the help desk for internal and external customer support. In fact, these communities are simultaneously reducing costs (less support calls) and increasing revenue (SEO lead generation). Follow along as I explore the history of documentation […]

Diversity and Innovation – Improve the Person, Improve the Idea
A key aspect of the next generation of innovation is the ability to tap a much larger set of minds in pursuit of valuable ideas. This draws quite heavily from the realms of Enterprise 2.0 and crowdsourcing. The historic method of innovation relied exclusively on a designated few. Now we’re seeing companies recognizing a missing […]

Three Models for Applying Customer Feedback to Innovation
Customers have always been core to companies’ existence. An obvious statement for sure. Customers are the source of cash flow, and have historically been thought of in marketing and transactional contexts. But in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of a new way to consider customers. As vital influencers of company activities and strategies. Two […]

Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is heating up in terms of corporate interest. Pepsi’s decision to skip the Super Bowl in favor of a crowdsourced ideas initiative – Pepsi Refresh – is an example of the interest in the market. Digital strategy, marketing and design firm Last Exit called crowdsourcing a top digital marketing trend for 2010. Contests are […]

Designing for Innovation through Competitive Collaboration
In a recent blog post by Intel’s Enterprise 2.0 manager Laurie Buczek, she reviewed her organization’s 2009 experience with social software. One item caught my eye: My entire year has been a quest to find quantifiable ROI. I swear I have nightmares with the “Where’s the Beef” lady crackling out a “Where’s the ROI?!” In […]

Jive Software vs. MindTouch – a Guide for Decision Makers
(Editor’s note: we typically ask guest bloggers to refrain from promoting their own products and services. However we feel that this is not a promotional piece but a well-written comparative review which should be valuable to our readers, but with the caveat that Mark works for MindTouch. We encourage anyone and especially Jive Software to […]

Managing Employee Innovation Communities
Tapping a diversity of perspectives has been empirically proven to increase the quality of ideas. Indeed, this is one of the benefits of setting innovation communities. By investing some time in establishing a community management plan, organizations will see a nice return on their innovation efforts. There are three distinct phases to innovation community management: […]

External Innovation Communities
At the recent Spigit Customer Summit, Jeffrey Phillips of innovation consultancy firm OVO presented on the benefits and trade-offs of external communities. Open innovation is a growing area of interest for companies, where they work with external constituencies to provide input for future business, product and operational roadmaps. For good background on this movement, check […]
Webstock – Heather Champ – Shepherding Passionate Communities
Heather Champ is the director of community at Flickr, seeing it grow to 24 million members sharing 2.8 billions photos and videos with 3 billion page views per month. Heather started off warning the audience that she would swear during her presentation, consider yourselves warned by extension! Heather loves that Flickr allows users to see […]
Webstock – Meg Pickard – Content, Communities and Collaboration
Meg Pickard is the head of communities and user experience for guardian.co.uk. She points out that users interact with content in many different ways. Consume, React, Curate, Create… If people can create recommendation lists on the likes of Amazon, why can they not on traditional news sites (writers comment – isn’t this what digg is […]