An innovative approach to digital collaboration

In the post-COVID-19 environment, organizations are struggling to respond to the ongoing challenges of new risk and become more resilient, adaptable, agile, and responsive. They’re looking to adjust and refine their business strategies, operating models, and workflows rapidly—informed by a wide range of insights and perspectives.

Doing this requires decisiveness, as well as collaboration at a scale and speed greater than ever before—two requirements that can be at odds. Digital technology can help, but it is only part of the solution. In our experience, how technology is applied is just as important, if not more so.

Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence can extract insights from digital collaboration, helping to synthesize possible outcomes after the conversation concludes.

Over a decade ago, we began experimenting with a new platform to support large scale conversations and innovation across a global employee population. By continually iterating both the technology platform and the process that surrounds it, we’ve been able to apply what we’ve learned, improve the overall approach, and arrive at a method we believe could have much wider applicability in meeting today’s need for better policy creation and decision making.

The foundation for more effective conversations

We call them “Innovation Jams,” and they serve as an instructive model. An Innovation Jam is an event held over two to three days with a focus on—and support for—broad participation. While dependent on the size of the organization holding it, most Jams involve tens of thousands of active participants.

Jams can focus on anything from a company’s identity and values to innovative new business ideas to creating the ultimate customer experience. A typical Jam offers three to five primary discussion areas—the big questions or issues participants are invited to explore. Each discussion area has several sub-sections based on aspects of the key issue. Within each sub-section, though, participants can launch new threads and contribute to existing ones, with no predetermined limit on thread number or length.

At first glance, making sense of thousands of comments across thousands of threads seems close to impossible—for participants, as well as anyone trying to extract insights, ideas, and conclusions from a Jam.  It’s physically impossible in the limited event time to read, consider, and respond to all the comments made. But a suite of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence tools running in parallel with the conversation does the heavy lifting of extracting insights from the content and helping to synthesize possible outcomes after the conversation concludes.

Learn how this type of next-gen digital collaboration can help your organization have more meaningful conversations—and make decisions while they're still relevant.