For those unable to attend hats off to Steve King, Jim Ware, and Josh Holbrook for a fabulous AppGap webinar Friday. It provided a complete scan of the remote working landscape including benefits and challenges to organizations.

Particularly thought provoking for me was the discussion about P&Gs “Connect & Develop” program as an example of “amplifying” individuals and organizations, and breaking down organizational barriers.  For a recent Inside Knowledge Magazine article on “Broadcasting Innovation” (co-authored with Victoria G. Axelrod) we contacted Larry Huston, Managing Director, 4iNNO, who as P&G’s Vice President of Innovation, was responsible for implementing “Connect & Develop”. Larry described the positive business impact of reaching beyond P&G’s internal research and development facilities for innovation as:

“Using this program, along with improvements in product cost, design and marketing, R&D productivity increased by nearly 60%. Innovation success rate more than doubled while the cost of innovation fell. From 2000-2006 R&D investment as percent of sales fell from 4.8% to 3.4% while creating 250 products generating billions in new top line sales.”

For the same article we also looked closely at InnoCentive, the innovation marketplace pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly initiated in 2001 to reach beyond the walls of their internal laboratories and “crowd source” or “broadcast” their research needs.  Today InnoCentive connects commercial, academic, and nonprofit organizations “Seekers” that post “Challenges” spanning a wide spectrum of industries and disciplines to “Solvers“.  Solvers are incented with cash awards that have ranged from $5,000 to $1,000,000. 125,000 plus engineers, scientists, inventors, business people, and research organizations in more than 175 countries are reached.

Intriguing regarding InnoCentive is what Harvard Business School’s Lakhani and colleagues found from investigating 166 discrete scientific problems “broadcast” for resolution by 26 company laboratories between 2001 and 2005. They attributed this open approach to  “a 29.5% resolution rate for scientific problems unsolved by R & D laboratories of well known science-driven firms.” (1)

More interesting in light of Friday’s webinar was why accessing a larger pool of external talent works and other factors in problem resolution.  Success was associated with the ability to “attract specialized scientists with diverse scientific interests.”  In addition, “successful solvers created solutions to problems that were on the boundary or outside of their fields of expertise.” Openness worked to “trigger the transfer and transformation of knowledge from one scientific field to another. Efficiencies were gained as solver drew on information from previously developed solutions.” (1)

Knitting together the Lakhani et al InnoCentive findings with outcomes from recent research into how Google’s prediction markets operate has me wondering about the potential impact on geographically separating a company’s workers for diversity of thinking and innovation. At Google, Bo Cowgill (2) and researchers found:

“Traders in the same location tend to make the same trades at the same time. The trades of cubemates within a small radius is the best predictor we found. By using a record of historical office changes, we could observe that the correlation begins shortly after people are seated nearby. It makes sense, because the physical proximity enables easy communication.”

So if:

i. Broadcasting problem research beyond the bounds of R&D labs through idea marketplaces like InnoCentive and P&G’s Connect & Develop program increases problem resolution, and

ii. Physical proximity of Google cubemates correlates with similar prediction market trading patterns

is it not possible that geographically dispersing workers, potentially, may result in more diverse thinking in an organization? 

My musing through Friday’s webinar about a possible link between remote working and diversity of thinking in organizations is pure speculation.  However, along with wondering what others took away from Friday’s seminar, I do wonder if anyone is aware of research into the topic of my speculation.

~ Jenny Ambrozek 

1. Lakhani, Karim R., Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse, and Jill A. Panetta. “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-050, 2007.

2. Cowgill, B., et al 2008- “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/flow-of-information-at-googleplex.html