"Politeness is the poison of collaboration" - Edwin Land

First off, sorry about the lack of posts lately.  Not that you particularly care, but its been a busy summer both professionally and personally.  Toss in a few days off here and there along with trying to project manage some remodeling work around the house...and there you go...too much to do and not enough time to do it!

So, anyway...I've been thinking an awful lot lately about the importance of collaboration with respect to innovation.  More specifically, I have been working with a client who is trying to establish an "Innovation Community of Practice" within the organization.  For years, they struggled with individual silos of product/service development activities.  At best, the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing.  At worst, the organization's services actually competed against one another!

The thought process follows that if we can start breaking down silos, form an organizational community of practice, demonstrate some successes and market the heck out the whole thing, we just might get people to collaborate in one uniform direction.  And there's that word again...collaborate.

Here are a few tips/tricks that may help your collaboration efforts:

• Understand that there are different personalities in every group
• Understand the differences
• Use the differences to your advantage instead of as fuel for disagreement
• Understand that on top of differing personalities you can also have different motivations and/or behaviors based on the circumstances
• Successful collaboration (and change) comes from providing more benefits than negative alternatives
• Reward those who interrupt and challenge...that promotes "non-accepting" behavior
• Encourage self-organizing teams (natural collaboration)
• Create cross-functional teams (unnatural collaboration)
• Implement robust collaboration tools
  
• Conferencing tools (web, video, telecomm, etc.)
• Web2.0 (wikis, blogs, message boards, forums, etc.)
• GroupWare (Lotus Notes, GroupWise, Sharepoint, etc.)
• Make sure there is a clear mission, vision or goal to ensure collaboration moves in the right direction...otherwise stand back!