Community Forum – Internal Collaboration

Resource Type
Survey (Community Forum)
Author
Innovation Research Interchange
Topics
Organizational Vision, Culture
Associated Event
Publication

How do you encourage internal collaboration?

How do you manage and leverage your internal capabilities to drive collaborative innovation activities?

  • How do you facilitate and motivate internal knowledge sharing and collaboration in a global setting?
  • How do you track and measure the level and progress of internal collaboration and knowledge-sharing?
  • Any suggestions on best-in-class tools/systems for managing internal capabilities and facilitating internal collaboration/knowledge-sharing?

Nasson Mwakatage, External Innovation Scientist, Mars Petcare

Community Response

John Homoelle, Director of New Technology and HERA, Michelman Inc.
We use a software program called Kindling to post campaigns and challenges to our global technology community. We also use this to post new ideas that technologists may have uncovered that may have applications to other business units. In addition, we use Sharepoint to post presentations and in knowledge sharing so that these can be easily located when one is looking for ideas on a challenge that they may need to overcome. 

In our research project database, we require our researchers to answer a series of open innovation questions before the project can be closed. The first two of these are “have you solicited ideas from anyone within your business unit on this challenge?” and the second one is “have you solicited ideas from anyone in other business units?”. Finally we set aside one hour each Friday morning for our technologists to collaborate with others outside their own business unit to mine ideas and we conduct an annual global technology conference where we bring all technologists in for a one week forum to collaborate.

We can track the level of collaboration and sharing in the project database that we use and in the Kindling software. We also track number of new products and revenue dollars generated as the result of such collaborations. 

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