One of the areas we looked at in our research into collaborative innovation with Dr Alain Samson at the London School of Economics on behalf of NESTA was the difficulties surrounding the more ‘intangible’ aspects of managing innovation e.g. where accountancy doesn’t prove to be particularly useful.

Many large organisations claim to have excellent and world-class capabilities in:

- Business processes
- Collaborative software (video conferencing, blogs, wikis etc.)
- Developmental support (workshops, training, coaching, learning etc.)

What appears to be missing from the client perspective is a methodology, system or tool (e.g. Kaplan Norton ‘Balanced Score Card’, Six Sigma, etc.) to help optimise collaboration, working relationships and productivity, particularly if a new
project is starting or a new initiative is under way.

So while the three areas mentioned earlier are very well understood by the majority of large organisations, a means or method to ‘scale’ collaboration and help enhance productivity in a systematic fashion is potentially a missing piece of the jigsaw.

By providing a systematic methodology and framework for decision making, research participant Bruce Lewin of 4 Groups has suggested that their 4G technology helps optimise the often ‘hard to manage’ or intangible elements of collaboration, namely working relationships, shared values and creative tensions that are part and parcel of any collaborative activity.

Bruce proposed a possible experiment/intervention. The context being that from a commercial and organisational perspective, collaboration is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, people intuitively acknowledge its value and significance, often citing ‘team work’, ‘engagement’ and open source and internet-based examples such as Linux or Wikipedia as success stories. On the other hand, there are no widely recognised processes or methodologies for collaboration which can be easily ‘managed’ or systematically applied to an organisation’s problems and its stakeholders. For the most part strong, replicable collaboration appears to most as an ethereal and intangible process and the main reason for this is that collaboration is dependent on the notoriously fickle and complex area of human interaction and dynamics.

A possible solution is 4 Group’s 4G tool, designed to systematically predict and optimise key components of collaboration, namely relationships, behaviours and culture. Having defined a number of ‘ideal’ relationship and cultural configurations, along with being able to predict relationship and cultural outcomes given different combinations of people, 4G creates a framework to enhance decision making and choices when looking to actively manage and enhance effective collaboration.

I caught up with Bruce recently and 4 Groups are currently carrying out some research into Emergent Leadership with Prof. Vlatka Hlupic at Westminster University. They’ve also been following-up their own research into the how 20-40% of performance is determined by people’s relationship (see The Hidden 20 – 40% on Slideshare). Hope to hear more from Bruce soon.