by Yann A Gourvennec
This post was originally published on the Marketing & Innovation blog
A short while ago I went to visit one of my customers in order to have a discussion about innovation. One of the ideas that was mentioned during this meeting was about the need to have a repository in which ideas could be stored and in which one could also exchange and debate about them. Immediately, the idea of a wiki sprang to my mind. It's only natural because this is what I'm using in the office; at Orange business services we have a Confluence(*) wiki platform, set up on top of an Oracle files database (a popular CMS platform used for building repositories) and the wiki enables us to store as many documents as we wish and start discussions with our colleagues and actually to organise ourselves around projects. This is very convenient and I thought it was worth mentioning in a discussion with my client.
And indeed the client in question was interested. However, this client also mentioned to me the name of a project by IBM that I have never heard of before: Thinkplace. At first I thought it was some sort of piece of software that you would put on the Intranet and then use to share material with your colleagues. But then I realised, by searching the Web with the 'thinkplace' keyword, that thinkplace was actually a fully fledged open Internet website whereby anybody, repeat anybody, can post ideas in order to be debated with others. I don't know if that's web 2.0 for you, but I think that's a great idea. So I entered my idea. The only way to test the system, is to do it hands-on, and actually if it is about proposing new ideas and getting people to start discussions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to submit an idea I had thought of and get the opinion of others. So here's my idea, in writing and in a short video which I recorded for the purpose and posted on Facebook too.
TerraBella: Connected Shared Office Spaces In Big City Outskirts tags: collaboration, productivity, work The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies, on the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises to avoid unnecessary commuting, + provide outstanding infrastructure & tools for knowledge workers Reduce the impact of commuting on the environment, improve work efficiency, develop open innovation, improve well-being of employees How would it work? How might it be implemented? Several high-tech companies could partner together to provide such shared spaces, in partnership with professional real-estate companies. Shared spaces could then be rented out to companies (large or medium) who would rent a number of cubicles for their employees: salespeople, knowledge workers, clerks etc What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea? The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies. On the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises so as to avoid unnecessary commuting, as well as provide a work dedicated area for knowledge workers, and also entice knowledge sharing across different organisations. The project is not technologycal per se, but technology is of the essence when it comes to making people collaborate. These shared office spaces could also be the opportunity for high technology companies (IT infrastructure, application software, telecommunications etc) to demonstrate new technologies in the collaboration area, and even develop new tools, more pervasive, more user-friendly. The impact on the environment as well as the well-being of employees would be dramatic. Despite the availability of cheap and almost unlimited bandwidth, pervasive and outstanding collaboration tools, which enable people to share documents and even design new ones over the Internet without leaving their offices, I have noticed that working habits by and large haven't changed much in the past 15 years. Despite all the talk about remote working, mobility, pervasive computing etc, most of the knowledge workers from our big cities around the globe are still doing the same stupid thing everyday: spend hours commuting from their leafy suburbs to the centre of town, or even the other way round. However, should we ask these people sitting at their desk why they have to be in the office, I think we would be very surprised to discover that, for a vast majority of them, the people they work with most of the time are not sitting next to them in the cubicle next door, but faraway. And even when they are located in a nearby building, chances are they will talk to eachother over the phone. The benefit would be manyfold. High-tech companies would not only make revenue on this, but that would also provide them some sort of showcase for their new technologies, and they would also be able to benefit from this initiative to show that their ideas can have a positive impact on the environment. This would be a compelling living proof that technology can actually do something about the environment. Participating companies would also benefit from this idea because they will have to invest less in real estate, they would have more flexible workforces, and it has also been proven by IBM in a similar experiment in Paris, France (1995 and beyond) that on average employees were gaining 1 1/2 hours every day on travel time and that one of our out of this one hour and a half was reinvested in work and productivity (employees been keen to show that they don't benefit from the system but are more productive.
(*) Confluence is one of the platforms made available to enterprises in order to set up internal wikis
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHUVBZW6oIU]
Comments