Businesses that are interested in open innovation, business development, social e-comm, content management, etc. now have powerful tools, web 2.0 and social software applications, to help employees connect the dots.

With the use of tags (on the fly classification of content), we can capture and discover meaning and context of many different ideas, even half-baked ones. On the fly tagging is important because with many new ideas, it is difficult to explain them. Simple tagging is a method to informally describe something in our own words. Follow me here - In a social networking application with many independent, diverse people tagging things, multiple meanings come out, offering fresh perspectives.

"The Wisdom Of Crowds"

Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping point " and "Blinks" offers some anecdotes on why we can't trust people's opinions - "...because we don't have the language to express our feelings" (audio file from IT conversations with Mr. Gladwell). Right! Well, sort of. Tags can become counterintuitive since many people can describe many of the same things with many tags. In other words, we get the network effect or the aggregated wisdom of crowds to help us make better decisions or at least give us better insights. So I believe by using simple words and metaphors - tags - we can create new meanings to describe our feelings about new ideas. Read my post from the other day about The Changing Nature of Brands.

"The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us"

how to be creative (latest version) from Hugh, Gapingvoid, . "We are [s]cared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.

We live in amazing and interesting times. If we're lucky, while on this earth we can do a damn good job proving it.

Your dream may be modest, it may not be. It could be a little candle shop; it could be a software company with the GNP of Sweden. It doesn't matter. Meaning Scales.

We are entering "The Creative Age". We have started to look for meaning.

Open Innovation Platform

We believe the ability to communicate and collaborate with people both inside and outside the company is a key business differentiator.

Give us a call, 973.433.4007, to learn how the wisdom of crowds can help your business become more profitable.

We are hungry. Meaning is the prey."

READY...dig in to your company's subculture and harvest raw ideas...

People want to participate! To find out how your people are dealing with daily challenges, start with enterprise social software. Simple tagging systems, which are found in most enterprise social software systems, are great indicators of what we are feeling towards people, places, and things. With these systems, we can create tagclouds to show the distribution of tags, from most to least popular tags. On every blog entry there are related tags (intersections) to internal resources as well as external ones (del.icio.us, flickr, and others), that help you define meaning and context - rich information. These systems improve the management, flow, and quality of ideas, both small and big ones, across the organization. We use them to classify, cultivate, spread, and apply ideas that target specific circumstances, aggregate themes or future possibilities. In other words, to get fast, meaningful results in a challenging environment, sync employees interests (what they value) as people to the realities of the business. Connect people, places, and things to ideas and information.

AIM... Challenges, Opportunities.

Get qualitative ideas from multiple sources - even unconventional ones that offer diversity and independence - blended and synthesized with your own. Employees using social software instantly establish relationships through shared tags, both internal and external ones (those from the Net) which lead to more and better ideas. Imagine having an immediate feedback loop to capture the company's informal social network - the daily problems, challenges, and opportunities that your employees and customers face. From resource allocation and processes to priorities and values - people can create innovative solutions to complex problems.

FIRE! ... Execute ideas to help yourself and other people discover meaning.