Facilitating Knowledge Sharing In Innovation Ecosystems

"Yes, we're decentralized, but we need to make sure we're doing things the same way. And not duplicating work. And staying autonomous and fast." If your company has product, engineering, and/or design teams distributed across organizations, you've likely heard this. It's a constant tension of modern org design. And if you lead one or more of those teams, you and your teams have almost certainly experienced that tension at one point or another. The challenge isn't the decentralization itself. The challenge is making it work. The playbook boils down to creating systems where teams choose to align because it helps them succeed, not because they have to: 🛠️ Start with enabling, not controlling ‣ Build platforms and tools teams want to use ‣ Create standards that solve real problems ‣ Share best practices, not mandates ‣ Make the right way the easy way ⚡ Design incentives that drive collaboration ‣ Reward knowledge sharing and reuse ‣ Make cross-team impact part of career growth ‣ Measure team AND system-level outcomes ‣ Recognize those who help others succeed 🤝 Create forums for connection ‣ Regular guilds/chapters for each function ‣ Cross-team demos and reviews ‣ Open innovation days ‣ Spaces to share work in progress 🎯 Build the right leadership behaviors ‣ Share context across organizational boundaries ‣ Make collaboration feel natural, not forced ‣ Focus on outcomes over process ‣ Model the openness you want to see 👥 Secure organizational support ‣ Executive sponsors who understand the vision ‣ Resources for shared infrastructure and tooling ‣ Organizational priority on working across boundaries ‣ Budget structures and cost-sharing models that encourage shared solutions You can't mandate your way to consistency, but you can set up the systems and incentives to make collaboration the path of least resistance to getting things done. #engineering #design #product #leadership #management ♻️ If you found this useful and think others might as well, please repost for reach!

My co-founder Catherine O'Shea just released "Breaking Silos: Connecting R&D, Product, and Marketing," a YouTube video that every innovation leader needs to see. Catherine brings her operational expertise to this challenge, sharing frameworks from industry leaders like Procter & Gamble, Ecolab, and an incredible case study from ACTION (Advanced Cardiac Therapies Improving Outcomes Network) at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. They connected pediatric heart specialists worldwide, scaling from 5 to 40 healthcare centers in just 2.5 years. Here's what makes Catherine's approach different: She focuses on the people side of transformation. - How do you actually get teams to collaborate? - How do you measure what seems unmeasurable? - How do you build culture that supports knowledge flow? The strategies she shares are immediately actionable—companies implementing these approaches see 30% faster time-to-market. An insight that stuck with me: knowledge sharing isn't just about documentation, it's about translation. When teams can effectively translate insights across functions, innovation accelerates. Watch Catherine's full video: https://hubs.la/Q03Gsr160 #Innovation #CrossFunctional #ProductDevelopment #Leadership #KnowledgeManagement

Lean Community:  Knowledge-Sharing.  In The High-Velocity Edge, Steve Spear explores how top-performing organizations achieve continuous learning and improvement through deeply embedded knowledge-sharing mechanisms. High-velocity organizations—such as Toyota, Alcoa, and parts of the U.S. Navy—excel by creating environments where learning is constant, fast, and widely distributed. Highly Recommend ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ -------------------- Spear identifies four key capabilities enabling these organizations to prevent knowledge from being siloed and instead drive systemic learning: 🏆 Seeing Problems as They Occur:  High-velocity organizations empower employees at all levels to detect abnormalities immediately. This real-time problem identification ensures issues are visible and actionable rather than hidden or ignored. 🏆 Swarming and Solving Problems Immediately: Once problems are seen, teams swarm to resolve them collaboratively. This mechanism accelerates learning and ensures that solutions are shared widely, rather than hoarded by a few. 🏆 Spreading New Knowledge Rapidly: Companies like Toyota standardize successful solutions and disseminate them across the organization. This avoids reinvention and ensures best practices are embedded into processes. The use of common tools, shared language, and simple documentation supports this rapid transfer. 🏆 Leading by Teaching: Leaders in high-velocity organizations serve as coaches, reinforcing learning principles and modeling behavior that encourages inquiry and continuous improvement. They create a culture where asking questions, experimenting, and sharing results—both successes and failures—are expected and valued. To prevent knowledge from being siloed, these companies institutionalize learning into routines and structures, making it a core part of daily work. Continuous feedback loops, process transparency, and decentralized problem-solving all contribute to a culture of shared learning. Ultimately, The High-Velocity Edge illustrates that sustainable competitive advantage comes not from one-time innovation but from an organizational system that learns faster and spreads knowledge more effectively than the competition. -------------------- Questions: 1. Is a culture of decentralized problem-solving more effective than centralized expertise for sustained organizational learning? 2. Can standardized processes for sharing knowledge limit innovation by enforcing conformity? 3. How can organizations balance speed in knowledge dissemination with ensuring the accuracy and quality of the information being shared? Looking forward to your comments! https://a.co/d/gwIBSYD #ContinuousImprovement #CultureMatters