Openness and Innovation in a Web 2.0 world

Today I have been speaking at the SOMESSO conference in London. I inherited the topic from my friend Luis Suarez… it was billed as “Knowledge management: Security, Intellectual Property and Privacy” but I spun it around a little to look at how exposing your company’s expertise and ideas to the web can actually improve innovation.

I’m completely indebted to Adam Christensen for his words (much retweeted today as something I’d said) about IBM’s approach to social computing, and for allowing me to reuse a couple of slides. I also loved Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post 12 Rules for Bringing Social to your Business, and reused his graphic from there. I thought there were some fantastic synergies with the previous three talks during the morning, and was able to continue some of the threads whilst taking them in a slightly different direction.

For more background on IBM’s approach, I recommend taking a look at an interview with Jon Iwata in which he discusses the loss of control, but the value of social media.