What drives Innovation and can you accelerate it.

people talk of innovation, knowledge discovery and how best to encourage them. Some structured processes do work but history shows that the best results come from unstructured interaction, often in corridors and around coffee machines.

with traditional collab technologies that were too dependent on Administrators / Resources etc. there is a natural inertia to the creation of new groups, topics, linkages that could lead to new ideas and knowledge discovery. very difficult to simulate the spontaneous discussions around the coffee machine.

With Groove a user who has a problem or idea can create a workspace and invite some members into it, who he feels have appropriate knowledge. Those members can then invite other members (if give rights) who they think have useful inputs. The original person may not even know the new members in advance, but someone did and introduced him to them. So discovery happens naturally.

Once together groove provides members with many ways of interacting in real time with discussions and calendars and live meetings and even structured data capture with Groove Forms. decisions are taken rapidly ideas tossed up and out by quick peer review. Members bring past knowledge to the table and an new KB begins to evolve around the task, good for future use.
At any time new members can be invited to provide specialised inputs and then they exit after their part is done.

A groove workspace is a fluid and lifelike environment which creates a warm nosed feeling among members, allowing them to relax boundaries and focus on the task. The best part is that members can take ideas home and work when it suits them - when they connect again all members will be synced.

Equally important is security and privacy - groove ensures that no one outside a workspace (non member) can ever see data from there - there is NO leakage. So people can speak freely with no fear that they will be overheard and compromised.

As a result of these factors someone like GSK who bought 10,000 licenses and used them for their R&D teams, found dramatic improvements. Project that involved 20-30 people across the world and normally took 7 months, were now completed in 4. Decisions that took days were taken on the spot and the quality of results was markedly better - they had their ROI in the first 3 months with costs down 40%..

Once you bring the groove culture into your organisation you will wonder how you ever did without it :-)

i could go on but it would help to understand what you have in your mind. some reading material here
http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcomputact%2Eweb%2Eofficelive%2Ecom%2Fdefault%2Easpx&urlhash=gBiJ&_t=mbox_grop