Collaboration has been a long standing interest of ours.  As a global research team, we experience the needs and problems personally.  Much of our prior work has been around getting people to think clearly about their use of collaborative technologies and not just employ them from reflexive habit.  As a global team, one of the important changes we have witnessed is the rising concern regarding Green issues and the growing awareness that we all bear responsibility for improving the planet.  In other words, we are all on the ‘Green Team’ and it behooves us to learn to collaborate as effectively as possible. 

In our research on Green IT, we learned that going Green will require many ideas which can add up and, in total, make a difference.  Consequently, it will be very important to generate and share a wide variety of ideas from many sources.  It will require collaboration on an extended enterprise scale.

During this project, we will conduct a number of experiments to explore how the ‘Igniting Purpose’ of Green can be used to improve collaboration and provide lessons about how to organize and deploy Global Business Collaboration more generally.

This project takes a broader view of collaboration, looking at the issues faced by global firms who must operate and innovate with multiple partners and customers, many of whom they will never meet face to face.  These collaborations are frequently complex:

• Requiring many more people than ever.
• Working in virtual teams with little shared daylight.
• Needing deep specialist knowledge.
• Staffed by highly educated personnel. 

As London Business School Professor, Lynda Gratton, notes in her November 2007 HBR article, these requirements not only make the job complex, but are the very characteristics that make it hard to foster effective collaboration.  Scale, virtualization, specialization and advanced education, if not dealt with, all tend to reduce the level of cooperation among groups.

View video - introduction to Global Business Collaboration 

Further information
If you would like to understand this topic further and its implications for your organization, contact your Account Representative.