sharpcloud at the European BizSpark Summit

2 June 2010 | Sarim

I’ve recently read an excellent article on Forbes.com where Michael Chui of McKinsey was interviewed on the Future of I.T.

He talks about distributed co-creation, a collaborative process which allows large numbers of individuals to create products and services iteratively with value. McKinsey Quarterly mentioned distributed co-creation as one of hot ten tech-enabled business trends to watch and in his interview Chui continues to discuss I.T’s pivotal place in this process and indeed talks about I.T allowing the organization to “re-conceptualize your competitive advantage”.

I recognize much of Michael’s co-creation thinking as very closely aligned to the challenges and benefits of our customer early adopters and their use cases; in certain cases we’re also hearing echoes of Michael’s secondary message that I.T can support new and in some cases revolutionary business models. This is particularly true with reference to I.T’s identification and exploitation of the business agility benefits of Cloud Computing… that’s a story for another blog.

I really like the term ‘value co-creation’ as it sum-up the process and benefits from using technology like ours. And since our launch in June we’ve been seeing value co-creation use cases and activity in four distinct categories as highlighted below (and seen visually in my sharpcloud story here.)

  1. Internal use cases include colleagues co-creating iterative value on strategic planning such as; strategy development and communication, corporate digital marketing, new product or service development and traditional technology and product marketing roadmapping.
  2. Bi-directional use cases include co-creation activity between communities from two different organizations. Specifically these include; major account management, portfolio management, alliances and partner management. Also we expect to see increasing numbers of joint ventures and M&A using sharpcloud as a “neutral” place to manage co-creation activities.
  3. Cross community & market co-creation use cases include; live focus groups providing feedback, forum and sector debate (for example to establish open standards), conference or academic collaboration and even sector based knowledge-management.
  4. Public crowdsourcing is a co-creation with many public and commercial use cases; open innovation and consumer to product seem to be catching the imagination and delivering. We’re also hearing a lot on public sector policy-based crowdsourcing but have yet to see this deliver and if you’re in the public sector and have a public crowdsourcing requirement, we’re keen to talk to you about how this could be achieved using sharpcloud.

It’s a very exciting time for us as we develop sharpcloud to support customers co-creating value on redefining strategy, business process or innovation.

If you or your colleagues are interested in finding out more about our revolutionary new software come along to one of our free educational seminars or webinars and get to know us and how we can support you.

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