Making connections

How does it work in the tranches

A question that I often get is "all these ecosystems sound good, but how does it work in practice?" In other words, being a CTO, a VP of Innovation, a Head of (New) Business Development, or a founder is not unique to Silicon Valley; why is that people seem to play openly, nicely, and productively.

The give

As compelling as the the BMW + Google connection may be, not all ideas are winners. Therefore, before the next good idea strikes, everyone is looking for practical insights ready for immediate application.

Benchmarks are always nice, i.e. we allocate X% to support our innovation efforts. Best practices are usually poplar, i.e. this is how we ensure smooth transition to a BU that owns the distribution. Business model often brings on spirited discussion, i.e. after trying X, Y, Z, this is what works for us.

The Take

Beyond sharing, the same forum can provide a safe environment to ask questions. Quetions on organizational changes, i.e. we are moving to a new organizational structure, what is the likely to impact my work? Questions on new ideas, i.e. I want to propose an initiative, what are good ways to get buy-in? Questions about an industry/application, i.e. we are exploring ways to offer excess capacity to this industry, what do you think?

The specifics may differ, but your cohort understands your issues and has your back. And, through this process of give and take, you know who to call when a flash of brilliance hits.

Connections

To paraphrase what Ron Burt of the Structural Holes fame argued in his recent book Neighbor Networks, being a node in the network, i.e. a stack of the bsueinss cards from the formal ecosystems, is nice but what you bring to the network, i.e. the give and take to help each other, is what makes your connections robust.

One last point worth noting is that this willingness to share is in part driven by the only certainty in Silicon Valley which is that future cannot be known a priori. It was not obvoous that Google should beat out Yahoo. It was not clear that e-reader will take off with Kindle. Today, with Facebook replacing Friendster in a handful of years, who is to say what social buying will be like in another handful of years.