One possible area that could benefit from a social network approach could be “innovation” in big multinational organisations.

Before leaving PA I worked on an idea for a multi national pharmaceutical company that wanted to promote innovation across their entire organisation, Worldwide.

One of the problems they faced was connecting the right people with the right skill sets with one another to help generate and develop ideas. These people needed a simple, self organised way of publishing ideas, videos of prototypes, documentation of designs, etc and then sharing those with each other and discussing them. The organisation in question was also keen to add some sort of formal process around the development of new ideas so that they could concentrate resources on areas with the most potential.

I could see a facebook like application working well here, as it would allow for cross time zone communication between people who are interested in the same ideas. It would also allow people to discover others with the right interests and skill sets to help them with their projects and allow them to share their documents etc in the same way facebook does with photos.

Some sort of voting functionality could allow the great ideas to float to the top of the pile, exposing the best and most popular ones to management for further investigation.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to develop the idea any further as I moved over to ProcServe before the Innovation project kicked off properly but it would have been a great project to work on.

Good to see you up and running with a more business focused blog.

Can you give any concrete examples of where you think a social networking approach is going to help with Knowledge Management? I’m struggling to think of something real and tangible.