Collaborative Innovation: Breaking down Barriers!

We're all familiar with the power of trust and openness in social networks (online or offline) and how they can mobilize individuals to accomplish things together. We can do the same in the business world and leverage the power of social networks to solve problems and bring new ideas to the market. Companies must learn to work together in a collaborative spirit, as though they were people with a deep motivation to create innovative services together, rather than relating exclusively through buying and selling. Online platforms designed to create this atmosphere of openenss, such as Starmind, Atizo and Innocentive, are valuable contributors to collaborative innovation, but there is also a growing need for people to work together face-to-face across company boundaries.

In this workshop, I will share experiences from Swisscom's Collaborative Enterprise Innovation (CEI) program. CEI generates COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) across companies to bring innovations to market. Essentially, a COIN is a group of self-motivated people who have a shared vision. They collaborate to achieve a common goal by sharing information, ideas and work. The key is to create an atmosphere of purposeful sharing and imaginative development. And in this spirit, we invite you to share your own adventures in breaking down the barriers within and between companies in the pursuit of innovation.

Together we will find ways to meet the following challenges:
- Motivate companies to move from "I sell, you buy" to "Let's build something together."
- Bring competitors together to build a new market.
- Move from talking about innovation to creating it.
- Create trust without signing non-disclosure agreements (No Trust Agreements)
- Bring the best and brightest together without paying them to be involved.
- Realize when you can't innovative alone and collaborate to move ahead.