Concurrent innovation
From AMI@Work Communities Wiki
By roberto Santoro
In the global business scenario, the human capital is deemed to be an essential competitive advantage by all involved business entities, being them individuals, enterprises and networks. Within the emerging knowledge economy, industrial competitiveness is based more and more on the creativity and productivity of knowledge workers in the development of new products and services. They are expected to fully exploit their individual potential whilst operating with and within business organizational arrangements aimed at primarily maximizing corporate efficiency and productivity. Within enterprises, value networks, companies’ clusters, as well as professional communities, the knowledge workers’ creativity and productivity issue has already been addressed in different ways, all considering the human interaction and collaboration as key enabling mechanisms to enhance creativity and innovation. Moreover, it has been recently demonstrated that the element of individual diversity is a decisive driver for innovation (Fleming, 2004). The cross-functional teamwork fostered by the Concurrent Engineering practices as the mechanism for inducing parallelism in the new product/service development process as well as to minimize the risk of expensive re-design loops in its later phases, resulted also in a stepwise improvement in the way in which knowledge workers were interacting within the new product development process, to the benefit of their effectiveness and capability of expressing their potential. This effect was further amplified by the subsequent deployment of the Extended/Virtual Enterprise paradigm in which collaborative teams were intended to overcome organizational barriers by including partners, suppliers and customers. Advanced collaborative problem solving methodologies for maximizing the creativity of knowledge workers in teamwork activities for new product/service development are emerging to address also specific cognitive and social aspects of collaboration. Nonetheless, despite of the good results achieved so far, best in class corporations currently perceive that they are approaching a limit of the possible improvements actually achievable in the exploitation of knowledge workers’ human capital within current organizational structures. The authors argue that a Copernican revolution is required where the individuals’ breaks out of the company borders and a network of knowledge worker peers (professional community) become the center of the organizational constellation. The breakthrough concept is to create an entanglement between the network of individuals and the organizations, by allowing the knowledge workers to be at the same time, an “employee” of the organization and a “member” of the professional community. Knowledge is created in the community through peer collaboration and then offered for exploitation to the constellation of organizations. The underline assumption is that a peer environment enable individuals to express their full creative potential, by making them feeling part of a shared intent (social dimension), being empowered to higher knowledge creation possibilities (collaborative knowledge) and controlling the potential economic benefits deriving from their achievements (explicit business dimension). This paper defines the conceptual framework of a new paradigm for integrated product/service development, referred to as Concurrent Innovation (CI), which is deemed able to overcome the current limitations in the exploitation of the human potential in new product/service development. The Concurrent Innovation is proposed as a systematic approach for managing innovation cycles, from the generation of new ideas to the large deployment of new products/services, enacting the full exploitation of all the involved individual intellectual capabilities. The implementation of the Concurrent Innovation paradigm in actual business environments is realized through the introduction of new organizational entities, the human centric KBS virtual professional communities, which are intended to interplay in entanglement with traditional business entities, as well as with collaborative networked organizations such as companies’ clusters and Virtual Enterprises. The CI forum objectives are to validate a set of vision statement defining ESoCE net vision by 2010 of the Concurrent Innovation paradigm and to identify the key research challenges to realize such vision.
