How to Leverage Network Effects in Enterprise Collaboration

“The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success”

• Edward Glaeser, Professor of Urban and Social Economics, Harvard University

In his book “Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier,” Glaeser explains the ethnography of Cities and how cities are humanity’s greatest invention. The reason for their immense influence is how they speed innovation by connecting their smart inhabitants to each other through the absence of space between people and companies. Cities are the proximity, density and closeness of it’s people and ideas.

So how do you apply the principles of urban planning to build your Enterprise network?

Shared Space — Success depends on the ability of people to share ideas and to influence one another at close proximity.

Platform thinking — A platform view of a business emphasizes the value of connections. Enable resources to come together and collaborate. Sometimes quickly and temporarily, sometimes in a relatively fixed way — to create value. Some resources may be inside, permanently owned by the company; some will be shared; and some can come from the outside.

Reduce Friction — If the adoption threshold for collaboration is too high, the result isn’t mediocre collaboration, it’s isolation and silos.

Shared Space

The urban ability to create collaborative brilliance isn’t new. For centuries, innovations have spread from person to person across crowded city streets. An explosion of artistic genius during the Florentine Renaissance began when Brunelleschi figured out the geometry of linear perspective. He passed his knowledge to his friend Donatello, who imported linear perspective in low-relief sculpture. Their friend Masaccio then brought the innovation into painting. The artistic innovations of Florence were glorious side effects of urban concentration; that city’s wealth came from more prosaic pursuits: banking and cloth making. Today, however, Bangalore and New York and London all depend on their ability to innovate. The spread of knowledge from engineer to engineer, from designer to designer, from trader to trader is the same as the flight of ideas from painter to painter, and urban density has long been at the heart of that process.

At Dropbox, a company that has built a network with 3.1 billion connections, we’re witnesses to how thriving organizations leverage shared digital space as a conduit for ideas, innovation and business value. The proximity to customers and partners, the degree to which they cluster and collaborate have resulted in a well-spring of value. Here’s an example of a geographically dispersed organization with 3700 users that’s densely networked and is able to operate in a highly collaborative fashion with a high clustering coefficient and 12,000+ sharing relationships:

Platform Thinking

The 2016 Gartner CIO Agenda surveyed nearly 3,000 CIOs across 84 countries, representing approximately $11 trillion in revenue and $250 billion in IT spending and found harnessing the power of platforms as the top agenda item.

“A platform view of a business emphasizes the value of connections. Unlike a traditional fixed system, with a clear inside and outside (suppliers providing inputs, and internal people/ assets/capabilities creating products/services and delivering them to customers), a platform provides the business with a foundation where resources can come together — sometimes quickly and temporarily, sometimes in a relatively fixed way — to create value. Some resources may be inside, permanently owned by the company; some will be shared; and some can come from the outside.
The Value comes largely from connecting the resources, and the network effects between them.”

Turns out that the success of a modern enterprise with semi-porous company boundaries and an ecosystem of suppliers, customers and partners has qualities resembling a city and a fundamental need to drive value from collaboration and connectivity through the enterprise’s network.
With the dramatic impact of collaboration, the enterprise shift in operating model from systems view to platform view has significant implications for infrastructure design and IT strategy. If platform and network theory have a 100+ year history and are well understood, then why is this an upcoming priority and not a reality? Networks of people are fundamentally very difficult to build and the friction must be reduced.

Reduce Friction

The impact of collaboration on an enterprise may be easier to understand through the implications of it’s absence. The leading thinker in understanding how people are connected in the digital age is likely, Paul Adams, VP of Product at Intercom, former UX researcher at Google and Head of Brand Design at Facebook. In his book “Grouped, how small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web,” Ideas spread when people have low adoption thresholds. When ideas spread, there are always two parties involved: the person passing on the idea, and the person receiving the new information. We often overlook the person who is receiving the idea and whether they are easy to influence. Researchers call this a person’s “adoption threshold.” If the adoption threshold for collaboration is too high, the result isn’t mediocre collaboration, it’s isolation and silos.
Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski, quantifies the perceived social and emotional distance above the adoption threshold in her research on Virtual Distance. Companies have consistently underestimated the impact of Virtual Distance, which can be the silent killer of innovation, productivity, and project success:

When shared space, platform thinking and reduced friction are utilized, one Dropbox partner, Ramy Katrib, CEO of Digital Film Tree concretely defines the results:

“What’s the difference between a Youtube Video and a Feature Film from Universal Studios, Fox or Disney?

Collaboration.”