How the Next Generation Enterprise is Different
Beyond Hierarchies to Peer Collaboration (part 3 of 10)
In the past, corporations have organized themselves according to strict hierarchical lines of authority. Everyone was a subordinate to someone else -- employees versus managers, marketers versus customers, producers versus supply chain sub-contractors, companies versus the community. There was always someone or some company in charge, controlling things, at the "top" of the food chain.
While hierarchies are not vanishing companies are beginning to conceive, design, develop, and distribute products and services in profoundly new ways. Peers within a firm can collaborate across old silos. Companies can collaborate as peers rather than as superiors and subordinates in a supply chain. And peers can create value outside the boundaries of traditional companies - social networking is becoming social production.
After all, if you can make an encyclopedia through mass collaboration, consider what else? How about an operating system (Linux) or applications software (Sugar CRM is one of 125,000 open source applications projects underway). How about a mutual fund (www.marketocracy.com), a peer-to-peer lending system (www.zopa.com), designer t-shirts (www.threadless.com) or other physical goods (www.cambrianhouse.com)?
Perhaps a complex physical good like a motorcycle? The Chinese motorcycle industry -- now the largest in the world -- is a sprawling network of parts makers with no single company like Harley Davidson pulling the strings. Or take the most complicated product you can think of -- a new generation jumbo jet. Rather than creating a specification for its supply chain, Boeing co-innovated the 787 Dreamliner with thousands of partners around the world in a mind-boggling peer-oriented ecosystem.
While some fear that these heaving communities and new business models will reduce the proportion of our economy that is available for profitable activity, leading firms are proving otherwise. Collaborative innovation can bring the prepared company rich new possibilities to unlock innovative potential in a wide range of resources that thrive inside and outside the company.
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