Organizations are facing today the most challenging conditions of their history. A decaying economy, multiple geopolitical threats, urgent environmental and societal issues, are setting the stage for what might be the most disruptive changes since the industrial revolution in the early XIXth century.
At the same time, the rabid evolution of technology allows everyone to connect to everyone and to share information and knowledge with barely no other limit than the speed of light, unveiling a full spectrum of new opportunities (as well as, let’s face it, threats) for businesses.
Trying to define a conceptual and actionable framework for enterprise 2.0 and related topics is a mind-boggling challenge, especially as most practices and initiatives are in such an early stage. Forecasting an overwhelmingly wicked future, even near, requires more than implementing toolsets or conducting surveys.
Problem
The collaborative enterprise, as an organizational model as well as an operational framework, is still in its infancy. Many of the tools we will use in ten years from now and that will shape our behaviors, in the workplace as well as in our personal life, still do not exist. While many clues about the necessary redefinition of core business capabilities coexist (value co-creation, service dominant logic, customer centricity…), we have no common understanding of what will make an organization thrive in the forthcoming years.
Tentative Solution
In such a complex situation, the aim of the Future of Collaborative Enterprise project is to draft some paths to a better understanding of organizational evolution in the era of the social web, for use, remixing and improvement by anyone interested in business transformation.
To do so, we are interviewing academics, practitioners and thought leaders from diverse fields (social business, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, IT, education, scientific research, etc) following a Delphi survey-like methodology, and will then build scenarios from all gathered insights, with the help of design thinking methods, to sketch plausible solution prototypes.