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Efficient intra- and inter-company collaboration capabilities determine the future for many businesses. Each of us can take an active role in this broader shift by strengthening our collaboration skills.

Team-work is an essential part of business life today. We often meet to go through material and share our screens when presenting. You can describe this as sharing once someone have already put the ideas on paper. This will remain important and our ability to share our creations will not go away.

The biggest changes are how we collaborate in earlier phases. Today we meet around a whiteboard and brainstorm. The whiteboard will go digital and we will in the future join around virtual whiteboard where yours is on the screen closest to you. Our brainstorming sessions will move to become more cross-departmental and cross-companies. It is in this ideation face we will see many the creation of most competitive edges.

Another vital aspect is your business ability to create and share fast. The digital economy will requires rapid transfer of knowledge. Your company’s best ideas must reach the sales-force earlier. Your thought leaders release ideas earlier to the teams refining them. Knowledge is the fuel in this process and your employees and your knowledge sharing mechanisms set the pace.

Extensive collaboration and sharing requires a different culture. Keeping information close to your chest is counter productive. This worked well in a world structured in silos, and someone could control the information push.
In a world were colleagues and customers and pull information, you need to make it available earlier. This is also consistent with agile ways of working introduced in various company processes. Iterative development build on sharing and enhancing in all stages of the creation.

Good questions ask to improve your collaboration skills are:

1. What kind of knowledge do we need to bring to the frontline? – Your sales force is the one to start building your knowledge capability systems from.
2. Who are our superstars we need to secure take an active part in the knowledge sharing process? – It is the edge competence that will differentiate your business.
3. In which format do we share our knowledge? – Most parts of your sales force will be dependent on having access to it on their mobile phones.
4. How do we secure it become part of our DNA and not a forced activity? – Collaboration is a new core process and you want it to operate smooth on a daily basis.

For further reading ideas on collaborations in an innovative environment turn to:

• Making cross-enterprise collaboration work [ARTICLE]  – by Accenture
• What makes collaboration actually work in a company [ARTICLE] – by Kate Anderson, Forbes
• Winning the knowledge transfer race [BOOK] – by Michael J. English, William H. Baker
• Social business increases internal collaboration [BLOG] – by Vanessa DiMauro, Socialmedia Today