ActionMap Waves

Show Me the Score

Of course it may seem a little farfetched that “collaborative solutions development capability”, a term that has just been invented, could be the difference between industry leadership and organizational survival(or the same for individual careers). And it must be questioned whether this is only a roundabout way to draw attention to ActionMap’s solution, the ActionMap Toolkit.

Again, what is needed is an starting action point, one that will both increase the sense of importance of collaborative solutions development capability, and provide a way to take action on it.

That starting point is a scorecard that that can be used to assess your organization’s (and your individual) readiness to increase collaborative solutions development capability.

The scorecard can be found at http://www.actionmap.com/050_ScoreSumm.html

The website does not capture the scorecard results. The summary results can be printed for your later review.

Conclusion

The biggest bottleneck in innovation and IT is the gap between separate knowledge and interests and agreed upon activities, processes and plans.

Separate knowledge and interests

=>  X  <=

Agreed upon activities, processes and plans

The first obstacle in overcoming this bottleneck is that there is
no existing category of solutions that:

  - effectively deals with the bottleneck, or even
  - effectively focuses attention on it.

This article proposes that:

  - the name of the activity of bridging this gap is “collaborative solutions development”;

  - a new product and service category needs to be established with the same name; and

  - the set of skills and tools that are used to produce results in this activity should be called “collaborative solutions development capability” or “CSDC”.

This article further proposes that collaborative solutions development capability is a strategic competitive competency, in the sense that:

  - collaborative solutions development capability will be increasingly important to organizational and individual success for the foreseeable future;

  - the individuals and organizations with the strongest collaborative solutions development capabilities will have long term and far reaching competitive advantages;

  - developing collaborative solutions development capability needs to be an integral part of organizations’ and individuals’ competitive strategies.

Finally, this article points to an online scorecard, where readers can assess their individual and organizational preparedness to increase their collaborative solutions development capability.