Kellogg World Alumni Magazine
THREE CORE DRIVERS
OF THE COLLABORATION ECONOMY
To compete on a global level, we need to be dually focused on innovation and productivity — productivity to help fund innovation, and innovation to provide our customers an advantage in their markets. Innovation, by the way, requires a healthy dose of courage — on both an individual and organizational level. In this day and age, it's critical for businesses to adopt that mindset if they're going to achieve growth and prosperity.

Jim McNerney,
chairman, president and CEO of Boeing Co.


1. New Technologies
Changes in technology enable and reinforce the Collaboration Economy. New technologies expand the scope and nature of human connection; they enable a broader range of communications and they facilitate the availability of new types of data, information and knowledge.

Facebook and LinkedIn have changed how millions of people meet, connect and keep up to date on each others' lives. Physical proximity is no longer a limiting factor in making and keeping friends and colleagues. These technologies have also become key to how businesses connect with customers. Oreo Cookies now has close to 30 million "likes" on Facebook, and Coca-Cola is nearing 50 million.

At the same time, the rise of blogging, YouTube, a myriad of online music stores, and other forms of consumer and affinity-based distribution technologies have disrupted traditional media outlets. Production and distribution of content are no longer controlled by a few large players.

And firms in every industry have discovered the power of crowd sourcing — harnessing digital networks for distributed problem solving that requires specific types of technical knowledge. This strategy gives all types of businesses, teams and individuals access to complex data and processing capabilities that were seldom before available.

The advent of Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones and other technology has changed the world dramatically. We live in an environment that is more competitive and more connected than ever before. Technology has changed the playing field — control and power have shifted from institutions to individuals.

Sheryl Sandberg,
chief operating officer at Facebook

2. New Information and Big Data
New technologies make more information available about people, products, relationships and choices. Wikipedia has become a first source of knowledge on a broad variety of subjects, and Khan Academy offers nuggets of basic learning on topics from calculus to microbiology in easily digestible chunks.

The supply and production of information itself has expanded greatly with the "big data" phenomenon. Massive, digitized collections of data hold more and more detailed information about the people and organizations that inhabit the globe. The challenge of this data is volume — how to manage it and mine it to reveal new insights. The emerging field of information analytics is becoming a key business function.

3. The Emerging Global Virtual Culture
The Collaboration Economy is also rooted in an emerging human culture of access, openness and trust. When people enter the digital world through their computers, smartphones and other devices, they ask questions, share information and reach agreements with a fluidity seldom seen before in human history.

By 2050, the world's population will increase to 9 billion people. And with that population growth comes tough problems such as how to provide affordable food, protect the environment and create sustainable sources of energy. As leaders, we need to embrace these global problems, and harness the power of innovation and collaboration to find real solutions.

Ellen Kullman '83,
CEO of DuPont

A new global culture is emerging that transcends national, ethnic and organizational boundaries — the old institutions that used to develop and regulate our shared, taken-for-granted rules for interaction. It is a culture that assumes 24/7 electronic access — for emailing, tweeting, posting and texting.

This new culture is particularly powerful in the norms of trust that it engenders. Markets require trust to operate effectively, and the old rules of building trust over long periods of time have softened. Over the Internet, parties with limited histories of personal interaction readily connect, communicate and take risks together.

Perhaps one of the earliest and best examples of this phenomenon is the "open source movement," founded in 1998 by a group of free software advocates. Through that movement, the Linux operating system was created and is now widely adopted by corporate computing managers as a high-performance, lower-cost alternative to proprietary software from Microsoft, Sun and others.