The discussion starts with approaches to innovating in established enterprises, touching on the various challenges involved: how to improve adoption especially when trying to reach different generations within an organization; dealing with shorter development cycles and increased complexity of information; and the importance of a company's business processes and the heterogeneity of the people in those processes.
The panelists provide examples about the impact of social software such as blogs and wikis, including changes in the so-called command and control attitude of top-down organizations. To deal with increasing pace of change and complexity, companies may define new strategies internally or choose to take advantage of firms offering intermediary services, either way giving up control and moving toward more collaborative processes.
Finding the right balance is a particular challenge often mentioned by Sanford, Polese and Park. The balances aimed at include those between leaders and followers in an organization, between using traditional communication channels and adopting social software, between maintaining control and opening up and letting go, or between protecting intellectual property rights and achieving faster adoption rates.
