Dr. Neil Hair

You may have noticed a few updates from me recently on the Cisco project via Twitter and Facebook feeds. I have been thoroughly impressed with the quality at which participants have spoken (sometimes candidly) about their use of social media for innovation and collaboration. The list of local, national, and truly global organizations include a pretty impressive 90 companies so far (and no I cant share specific details or contacts with you until the project is complete); the big such as - Xerox, Kodak, 3M, Bank of America, Seagate, KBC Banking and Insurance, BAE, Corus, Telstra, the nimble - Carrot Creative, Logicalis, Tipping Point, Earthscribe, Clearspring Technologies – and the just plain beautiful – Mac Village Productions, Blue Fountain Media, Fixitology, iwritemarketing, Accession Media, Girls in Tech amongst many many others.

The project is soon to come to a close with only a few thought leaders left to interview. Then begins the process of coding and analysis to draw together common themes. Once that is complete I get to represent a great team of researchers in announcing the findings of this study at Cisco's CIO summit event in October in San Diego - a huge privilege!

Ive learned a great deal from my conversations with experts in this area and look forward to crunching over 100 hours of data in the pursuit of a theory of innovation and collaboration in social media. One thing is for certain, passions run very high for this area, there is most certainly a huge competitive advantage to be had by organizations using these tools effectively, metrics ARE available for ensuring successful outcomes, and caveats, of which there are many, have to be avoided. It is proving to be a really exciting project.