Introduction - At the Tipping Point

As managers, we need to shift our thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate
– the best way to gain power is sometimes to give it away.
– Thomas W. Malone

We are at the dawn of a new way of working together, thanks in large part to technological advances that allow a radically superior mode of innovation than ever before. Soon, businesses throughout the world will be looking for ways to unleash the power of their COINs. Some will be scrambling to figure out how to innovate in the new business environment.
Few today know COINs – Collaborative Innovation Networks – by that name, even though they have been around for hundreds of years. Many of us have already collaborated in COINs without even knowing it.

What makes them so relevant today is that they have reached their tipping point.
This idea of a tipping point comes from Malcolm Gladwell, who describes the moment of critical mass where radical change is more than just possible, but is a certainty. Thanks to the communication capabilities of the Internet, COINs are at that threshold; they have achieved global reach and they can spread at viral speed. Gladwell uses the word “epidemic” to describe what happens at the tipping point.

What is a Collaborative Innovation Network? There is a lot to the answer, and this book delves deeply into the DNA of COINs – the traits that must exist for COINs to exist and for COINs to succeed. Here we can offer a brief definition.
A Collaborative Innovation Network (COIN) is a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by the Web to collaborate in achieving a common goal by sharing ideas, information and work.
In a COIN, knowledge workers collaborate and share in internal transparency. They communicate directly rather than through hierarchies. And they innovate and work towards common goals in self-organization instead of being ordered to do so. Working this way is key to successful innovation, and it is no exaggeration to state that COINs are the most productive engines of innovation ever. COINs produced some of the most revolutionary drivers of change of the Internet age such as the Web and Linux.
This book explains COINs in depth, makes the case for why businesses ought to be rushing to uncover their COINs and nurture them, and provides tools for building organizations that are more creative, productive, and efficient by applying principles of creative collaboration, knowledge sharing, and social networking. There is information on leveraging COINs to develop successful products in R&D, grow better customer relationships, establish better project management processes, and build higher-performing teams. There is even a method offered for locating, analyzing, and measuring the impact of COINs on an organization.
In short, this book answers four key questions:

(1) Why are Collaborative Innovation Networks better at innovation than conventional organizations;
(2) What are the key elements of COINs?
(3) Who are the people that participate in COINs, and how do they become COIN members?
(4) How does an organization transform itself into a Collaborative Innovation Network?

In subsequent chapters, you will learn about the creators who come up with the visionary ideas, the communicators who serve as ambassadors of COINs and help carry new inventions over their tipping points, and the collaborators who form the “glue” of a COIN and make it see the vision through to reality.

In a sense, this is really two books in one. Chapters 1 through 6 make the business case for COINs and explain the technological advances that have led to the tipping point for Collaborative Innovation Networks. The three appendices are tools and steps to COINs: how to uncover COINs by analyzing the evolution of communication patterns; how to leverage COINs and combine customers and suppliers into a seamlessly integrated value network; and how to reassign tasks of COINs. One of the tools also shows individuals how to become efficient members of COINs and fully leverage their own skills as a creator, communicator, and collaborator.

The book is backed by numerous case studies of different types. Principles are illustrated by famous COINs such as the groups that created the World Wide Web and Linux as well as by stories of how “ordinary people” are leveraging COINs to achieve extraordinary success. The high-profile successes illustrate the tremendous potential of COINs, and the “everyday” COINs demonstrate that anyone can initiate and succeed with a COIN. Chapter 5 presents some specific examples from a leading manufacturer, a global service provider, financial institutions, and other sectors.

Innovate – Collaborate – Communicate
The creation of the World Wide Web is such an exemplary COIN that it warrants some further mention in this introduction. When Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web to the academic world at the 1991 ACM Hypertext conference in San Antonio, Texas, the hypertext concept had already come a long way.

A series of visionaries before Berners-Lee proposed the basic ideas behind the Web, namely to link pieces of information and make them accessible to many users. The first was Vannevar Bush, the famous scientist and advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In a 1945 magazine article, he described a system called Memex to make and follow links. But the information technology that emerged in the 1950s consisted of microfiches and card readers, and Bush's Memex system was never built in his lifetime.
In the 1960s, other visionaries moved the idea forward. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext”, and computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, who demonstrated the first working hypertext system, took up Vannevar Bush's idea. Engelbart invented the computer mouse while building the prototype “oNLine System” (NLS) that did hypertext browsing, editing, and email. But both men were still ahead of their time, and the spark did not yet fully ignite.

In the late 1980s, the hypertext concept found a firm footing in the academic computer science community, bringing together hundreds of researchers at the annual hypertext conferences. But it was only in the early 1990s that technology and the social context were ready and a team of enthusiasts got together to spin the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first hypertext system – Enquire – in 1980 while a consultant for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory. It took him years of grassroots lobbying at CERN, writing and circulating research proposals, until his boss finally approved the purchase of a Next computer in 1990s and allowed Tim to go ahead and write a global hypertext system. That same year, Robert Cailliau, another hypertext enthusiast from the CERN computer group, joined the effort. Together, they developed the first Web browser, editor, and server, soon reinforced by a small team of volunteers, mostly summer students at CERN.

Finally, in December 1991 at that San Antonio conference, Tim and Robert presented the ideas of their group to the academic community at large. By then, the virus had already spread, and the first Web server outside of Europe had been installed. People flocked to the Web development team, and programmers from Finland, Austria, Germany, France, and California built new versions of Web browsers and servers. When in February 1993 Marc Andreessen from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a browser called “Mosaic,” the tipping point was reached. The Web exploded. The next year, Marc and his colleagues left NCSA to form Mosaic Communications Corp., which later became Netscape and turned these twenty-somethings into very young millionaires.

Figure Intro.1 From the Memex to the ubiquitous Internet

The birth and explosive growth of the Web exhibits all the characteristics of a highly successful Collaborative Innovation Network at work. In the next chapters, we'll explore the “swarm creativity” that resulted in the Web, learn how internal transparency creates efficiency and leads to success, and how virtual trust and an ethical code holds a COIN together so that it can fulfill its vision.
To make the business case, though, we begin with benefits in Chapter 1. COINs offer tremendous innovative power, and we'll see how Tom Malone's statement at the top of this introduction is really true. If working collaboratively, in a transparent environment, is “giving away” power, it is also the way to gain the power of COINs.