The Future Arrives Early
At the beginning of the new millennium, we published an article entitled “The Future.org.” In 2005, we expanded that article into a book, Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Communities of Networked Firms Use Continuous Innovation to Create Economic Value. In those pieces, we predicted that a new organizational form would emerge in one of the world’s advanced economies, possibly as soon as 2010. This new organization would be composed of many firms working together collaboratively to create a continuous stream of innovative products and market applications. Today, we think the Blade community has many of the organizational features we anticipated and may be on its way to adding even more. Indeed, from our perspective, Blade.org may well be our Future.org arriving early.
In May 2007, we began a research study of the Blade community. Everything we have learned to date has excited us. Blade.org has the size and diversity to innovate across an array of markets, and it is becoming increasingly adept at creating new products based on the Blade processor technology. The organization has been thoughtfully designed, it is very well managed, and it has achieved rapid success (according to measures such as market share and competitive prowess).
We have been researching firm communities because we believe they are the next major breakthrough in the design of organizations. New organizational forms come into being every few decades because existing organizational approaches fail to make full use of the resources and capabilities accumulating in firms. A key barrier faced by many of today’s firms is that their existing markets frequently can not handle all their innovative ideas as fast as they occur. However, a complementary market served by other firms might well be able to make use of all or some part of the currently unused product or service innovation idea. Communities such as Blade can explore far more markets than firms acting alone, or even in partnership with one or several other firms, could uncover. Within a community, each firm has access to a broad set of potentially profitable linkages to other firms and other markets. Such linkages appear to be occurring almost daily within Blade.
Our direct experience with firms that might be regarded as predecessors to Blade.org includes two large well-known companies, an established but unfamiliar firm, and a recent start-up: Acer Group, Nokia, TCG Group, and Syndicom. TCG Group, founded in 1974, is a collection of small firms in telecommunications and related fields that work together internally, as well as with external technology partners, to develop innovative products that are customized for large customers. TCG is a model collaborator that has sustained its business model for over thirty years. The Acer Group is a Taiwan-based multinational IT company. Through its “business federation” organizational model, Acer has developed a reputation as a company in which innovation can start anywhere. Geographically far-flung marketing, production, and R&D units are all expected to think and act entrepreneurially and to work collaboratively with each other to pursue new product and service ideas. Nokia is similar to Acer in that it has many alliance partners (over 300 small high-tech firms), but Nokia’s collaborative relationships are primarily external. The firm and its partners have developed ways of building “fast trust” among interacting parties in order to facilitate rapid innovation. Lastly, Syndicom has rapidly and successfully built a “community of practice” around the medical specialty of spine surgery. It is currently bringing medical device manufacturers and distributors into collaborative relationships with the spine surgeon community to enhance the process of creating innovative products and services.
We believe that Blade.org can rightfully be called a pioneer of the new organizational type called a community of firms. Based on our research and experience, we believe that this particular community of firms has many unique features, and we look forward to learning more about why Blade.org has come so far so fast as well as helping the community identify and respond to the challenges that lie ahead. We have held familiarization interviews in several of the governing and member firms, and we hope to engage every firm in the community as our research project moves ahead. If you have any questions or suggestions about our research, please use the contact information below.
- Dr. Kirsimarja Blomqvist
- Dr. Grant Miles
- Dr. Raymond Miles
- Dr. Charles Snow
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