HBR List 2009

Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 under Collaboration, Innovation, Web 2.0, Wiki, social media |

HBR List 2009 (See the Feb 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review for full details) is really interesting. HBR list is an annual list of breakthrough ideas for the year and ideas that would impact businesses. Out of the 20 ideas presented there were two ideas that is linked closely to social networks (How social networks network best; Harnessing social pressure) and another on semantic web (What you need to know about semantic web). Interesting enough, there were only 2 articles on the credit crisis. If you think Web 2.0 is small, think again.

I believe that most business leaders are really scratching their heads when it comes to social networking, collaboration, sharing, instant messengers, collective intelligence, wisdom of crowds and so on. On top of all these terms there are examples like facebook, digg, youtube, flickr and thousands of other examples to understand. My goodness, even when I have studied this for two years now, sometimes I still feel like its a word game and everyone has their own take on different terms.

Rising above the confusion of terms, look at it from the fundamentals – connecting people together will lead to communication, sharing and supporting each other – this what communities have done since early human existence. With all these communication and sharing done of the web, the information is stored and reusable. Web 2.0 at an extremely high level is that simple.

So to convert it to business sense at a high level as well would mean that if you can connect the most people together and get them communicate and share effectively that would mean the platform is successful. If search and reusing of information is easy for users then collective intelligence and knowledge sharing has been achieved.

Get into this really really cool phenomena. You’ll enjoy it.