Are Yammer or CubeTree key for Bottom-up Innovation ?
In the last months we’ve seen an explosion of Yammer or CubeTree usage. Looking at how employees are leveraging these tools to spread knowledge and exchange ideas, one can bet that these services are a very good infrastructure for tapping into collective intelligence. Still looking for real cases where they boosted innovation, but I bet they are part of the tools we needed to foster bottom up innovation.
When it comes to innovation, organisations already have many internal creative thinkers: the employees; and many external creative thinkers: the customers. This blog is just about that: How to leverage these creative thinkers to generate ideas, select and implement the most profitable.
Jim Crandon
14 Jun, 2009
I’m curious how you’ve “seen” an explosion of usage on CubeTree and Yammer. Both of these systems are private and do not publish their user growth. Can you point to something or share where you got this information? It would give a lot more weight to your thesis.
Mark
14 Jun, 2009
You’re right, I should have been more precise. My analysis is mainly based on the number of #yum tag used in twitter. This tag is used by twitter users to cross-post to Yammer. Nowadays, there is almost 30 tags / hour. It was near zero 3 months ago. For CubeTree it is less obvious, so “explosion” was overselling. But look, it is increasing fast.
BTW, looking at figures from Compete.com or Alexa.com does not make it, since services like Yammer heavily rely on fat client or e-mail interactions.
Flywheel
15 Jun, 2009
Both services look cool on the surface. But they don’t hit the nail on the head. I am keen to find a service that truly optimizes a team that uses an agile approach.
I feel we are already burden enough email and phone. While team interaction is important, automation and delegation play a larger role. Personally, I don’t want to know more, I need quality filters to lighten my load.
Thank you for the post though. I had not heard of these two services.
Also, I really like your blog layout. It took me a few minutes to adjust to the theme, but now that I have, I totally dig it!
I am looking forward to reading your future posts.
Yunjian
24 Jul, 2009
That is right. depending on what you do, frequent exchange of information may not help productivity. Look forward to more interesting ideas on innovation.