Glen Mohr will co-present an Interactive Session entitled “Continuous Innovation for People Development: A Systematic, Sustainable, and Meaningful Learning Process” at the Corporate University Week conference in Orlando, November 18-19.

Senior management of one of our financial services clients has completed its review of the 11 business plans delivered by global teams of Vice Presidents in our program concluded last July. They have recommended that 8 of the projects move forward to implementation. A few are already well on their way. Two of the remaining three projects have been put on hold pending stabilization of market conditions.

Vanessa Dimauro of Leader Networks wrote recently about why communities help companies in uncertain times. With reference to the current financial markets crisis she says “Now’s the time for those organizations to use their social media tools,” and gives some suggestions for using online communities for crisis management. (more…)

With Salvatore Rasa and Barbara Kivowitz, Glen Mohr produced a video for a major health care system in Pennsylvania telling the story of their ongoing transition to an electronic medical records system. The video focuses on challenges to implementation, benefits to patients and providers and the need to extend the implementation, especially to inpatient care.

The prediction market we ran as part of our innovation program for high potential young employees at a large financial services firm turned out a great success on a number of levels. Most important, it generated excitement around the proposals, motivating a high percentage of participants to actively trade and provide a new type of feedback to one another. And, though forecasting wasn’t the primary goal of this market, the market results served well to predict project outcomes.

We invited all 52 participants to invest in the “stocks” of any of the ideas under development. Participation was completely optional and had no bearing on their performance in the program. In the seven weeks the market ran, over 2/3 of them actively traded, which, for a first-time market is an extremely high participation rate. Of course it helped that many of the participants are professional traders.

A handful of program alumni from the previous year also traded. Though it wasn’t a large group, they were paying attention to the innovative ideas coming out of the program and they were offering their insights - two objectives that are difficult to motivate in people who don’t have a stake in the outcome.

Because the ideas on which the participants were trading might take months or even years to come to market, we could not make the final valuation of the stocks dependent on, say, generated returns. Instead we asked the senior executives to “grade” each proposal on a specific set of criteria including strategic alignment, revenue or cost savings potential and thoroughness of the presentation. The aggregate grade became the final price. So in effect, traders were betting on how the senior executives would respond to the projects.

The market predicted which two ideas the senior executives liked the best. It also predicted three of the top five projects and four of the bottom five projects. So, this limited sample indicates that a group of young high-potential employees representing a broad cross section of roles, locations and functions, can think like their leaders.

For future iterations we are considering breaking out the various project criteria as separately traded stocks. This makes the market more complex but should provide better feedback on whether the market is indicating, for example, that people believe the idea is a good one but the team didn’t pitch it very well. We also plan to encourage earlier and more active participation by a wider group of stakeholders and alumni.

Our clients told us that this first experience with a prediction market opened their eyes to the power of collaborative tools for innovation. There is no question about this becoming a regular part of our programs and we are already discussing wider applications.

On Friday Mohr Collaborative wrapped up its second VP Development Program of 2008 for one of our major clients. Convening for the first time since June, nine teams pitched their projects, representing hundreds of hours of work, to ten members of the executive management team. In aggregate the projects represent $727 million in potential revenue over the next three years.

Glen Mohr was interviewed by ITBusiness Edge about how we use collaborative technology in our innovation programs: Mining Siloed Employees’ Knowledge a Key Collaborative Prize.

This week Mohr Collaborative wrapped up it’s second annual VP Development Program for one of our large financial services clients. After 3 months of intense work, 53 Vice Presidents on 11 global teams came to London to pitch their innovative proposals to senior executives. Projects addressed opportunities in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East as well as offering improved risk management and even a novel way to offer protection from falling home prices. Though all participants serve institutional clients, a number of the proposals crossed business lines to address retail client needs.

A few years ago, when James Surowieki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds, came out, I became interested in prediction markets as a way to tap the collective wisdom of the participants in our innovation programs. While we provide the innovation teams with frequent feedback from senior management, program faculty, and other industry experts as they generate and develop their ideas, I have always felt we could improve getting the participants to support one another. They are typically so wrapped up in developing their own projects, as well as doing their regular day jobs, that they are not inclined to spend time studying what the other teams are working on. As facilitator I inform the teams of the other teams’ work, recap the feedback that other teams are receiving and solicit input and resources from participants with relevant knowledge. I saw a prediction market as enhancing that mechanism by giving participants a quick (and fun) way to weigh in on other projects.

I am pleased to announce that this week we’ll be launching a prediction market as part of the innovation program Mohr Collaborative is running for one of our large financial services clients. My colleague Art Hutchinson (who blogs regularly about prediction markets, most recently here) and I have worked with David Perry of Consensus Point to provide the market technology. Participants in the current year’s program as well as program alumni will trade on the ideas in development. As many of our participants are professional traders, there is virtually no learning curve. I will write more as the market develops.

Okay, enough about SharePoint, here’s something more thought provoking about networks.

Earlier this season on Boston Legal, Denny fired an associate because she was fat and got sued for wrongful termination…

Nancy: But I wasn’t too fat for you to hit on?
Denny: Well no, because I like chubby sex but I never asked you to dinner.
Emma: Did you hear that?
Nancy: I only heard ca-ching, ca-ching.

Alan successfully defended Denny on the grounds that he was simply protecting himself from “catching” obesity, citing research reported on the front page of the New York Times. Last week my colleague Art Hutchinson pointed me to this conversation with Nicholas Christakis who, with his colleague James Fowler, published the research paper.

In the article, Christakis clarifies what Boston Legal so artfully took the extreme.

The real explanations for the obesity epidemic are exclusively socio-environmental — things having to do with the increasing consumption of calories in our society: food is becoming cheaper, the composition of food is changing, there is increasing marketing of foodstuffs and the like. Also, clearly, there has been a change of rate at which people burn calories due to an increase in sedentary lifestyles, the design of our suburbs, and a whole host of such explanations.

We are not claiming that such explanations are not relevant. No doubt they are all part of the obesity epidemic. We are just saying that networks have this fascinating property whereby they magnify whatever they are seeded with. And so if you can get something going in a networked population like obesity, it can spread.

I’m interested in what this tells this about how we learn. Learning is embedded in our network and “getting something going” in the network is how learning happens.

Christakis also explains that his research produced more evidence that the way obesity or other phenomena spread is by changes in perceptions about what is acceptable or appropriate, that is, norms, rather than simple copying of behaviors. Patti Anklam, a colleague and expert on networks wrote:

His research indicates that it’s the norms that are most influential because, as he says, “they can fly through the ether” whereas for behaviors to propagate we need to be physically together.