Building a global supply-chain of knowledge

N D Batra
The Statesman, 3 October

In a knowledge-driven world, collaboration is of the essence, though most of us are obsessed with a lone genius like Thomas Edison working in his laboratory, Henry Ford designing assembly-line auto manufacturing, Albert Einstein transforming space-time dimensions into abstract mathematical equations, Ludwig van Beethoven composing and conducting the orchestra and chorus in the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, which as the legend goes, he could not hear.

It is not that the proverbial lone genius will ever vanish; rather the most important point in the age of social networking and collaborative code-making is that geographically dispersed people and those who traditionally work in their silos, as most Humanities faculty members do, now have the means, such as constantly evolving digital platforms, to work together and enhance innovation, creation of knowledge and do cutting-edge scholarship.

Perhaps we should separate higher level creativity from the routine type of knowledge creation and innovation without which the modern world of globalised business cannot survive.

Increasingly corporations in their own self-interest are facilitating and encouraging their employees to build networks, share ideas with their peers and collaborate on projects even though they are divided by time zones, continents and cultures.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal scholars Rob Cross (University of Virginia), Andrew Hargadon (UC at Davis), Salvatore Parise (Babson College) and Robert J Thomas (Accenture) suggest that in order to maximise marketable innovation, collaborating organisation need to break barriers of poor communication, inefficient gatekeeping and insularity without which dispersed expertise cannot be leveraged to create new ideas that can be turned into products and services for marketing or increased organisational efficiencies.

In the digital age, poor communication occurs because of structural and bureaucratic barriers and because people who have expert power in one field fail to appreciate new ideas in others. Sometime collaboration fails because it is limited to very few people in partnering organisations, so if some key expert decides to leave, the network is weekend or collapses.

The first step in building collaboration for innovation is to make an inventory of individual expertise, how they complement each other and bring them up to an informal platform to share ideas.

Organisational leadership today lies in making strangers talk with each other. At a recent gathering of students and faculty from Australia and France at Norwich University, Joe Byrne, an associate vice-president, suggested before we sat for the dinner that we should sit and talk with people whom we never met before, which turned into a wonderful experience.

Normally at such gatherings people huddle with familiar faces and exchange the same small talk and jokes that they have been doing in the past. But talking to strangers brings new ideas. For example, I was sitting with a student from Australia and asked if Australians were learning Chinese because of its rising trade and diplomatic power. She said, no, Australians are more interested in learning Indonesian language, Bhasa, because the two countries are geographically so close, which gave me an idea what kind of alliances are evolving in response to the rise of China. But if this were a business or technological gathering, an idea like this would have been vetted with other experts to make it operational.

In the age of relentless globalisation, leadership lies in tapping and pooling brainpower within the organisation and outside and creating an environment of energy and enthusiasm for collaboration, which can work well only when people feel comfortable with each other. To self-organise, to explore, to develop new ideas, global corporations need swarming intelligence.

The challenge is how to integrate innovation activities and unique knowledge around the world as effectively as global supply chains integrate labour, raw materials, finance, and marketing. Someone said, networking combats inertia and myopia.

Collaboration, nevertheless, need not be limited to regional or national organisations in the age of off-shoring when it is possible to have a 24-hour workaday with three or four knowledge hubs spread across the globe. Work flows in loops across time zones, building on shared brainpower, each knowledge hub validating (checking upon each other’s errors) and adding value to the work done by the other, thus, hastening testing, vetting, shaping up and completing the final project.

In cyberspace, time zones need not be a liability but in order to turn them into an asset, as Amar Gupta of the University of Arizona recently suggested in the Journal, it is necessary to develop user-friendly IT systems that provide reliable and uniform services, which can be adapted to ever increasing complex environment across cultures.

The challenge for information technology guys from Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and other knowledge hubs is to create a system that is capable of aggregating and accessing available sources of knowledge and mining all modes of information, whether audio, video, pictorial, textual or in the form of a spreadsheet. The system should create a protocol, much like TCP/IP protocol, that transcends cultural, semantic and computer language/format barriers.

And finally, as Gupta suggested, the IT system should be capable of customising knowledge as per individual or group needs. For example, the IT system should be capable of automatically converting a report about Mynamar protests into various formats, such as newspaper, radio, television, and mobile devices such as cell phones to which editorial value could be added subsequently.

The world of collaborative knowledge seeking and innovation has just begun.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is working on a new book, This is the American way)