Innovation happens in many places and has many faces. Enterprises are required to nurture internal processes that work in sync like ecosystems to encourage front line intelligence to feed ideas through to management so that services, products, processes and teamwork ensues collaboratively to deliver benefits to the Value Chain. This requires effective team work and a supporting methodology that aims to treat your team more like an agile soccer team if you think about it so that anyone can effectively take control of the ball and score the goal.

In the book "Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice" by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen; the core concept of the "Job To Be Done" theory is introduced which is hugely relevant for enterprises wanting to leverage collaborative team work in creating value. The theory stresses that in order to drive organisational product, service and process excellence; we need to focus on alleviating the forces of anxiety, inertia, substitution and resistance across both the customer and employee value chain. Christensen articulates a mechanism to achieve this by firstly creating "specs" that define what outcomes and values are required in order to lead to customers or employees firing old methods, solutions, products and services and adopting new ones. In doing so, the product development team (as an example of a department vested with solving consumer problems) will be satisfied as they have induced consumer adoption either by bringing non-consumption into consuming contexts or working on incremental product and service innovation. Christensen states that "The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance".

This is important as traditionally, managers usually follow one of four primary organising principals in their innovation quest (or some composite therefore) being product attributes, customer characteristics, trends and/or competitive response. The challenge here is that these are not bad or wrong but they are essentially sampling of the most common and are insufficient and therefore not predictive of customer behaviours. In this article, I allude to how the Bioteaming action rules across the Organization, Execution and Connectivity Zone facilitates the dynamics required to solve the 'job to be done'.

I have invited leading Business Continuity Management (BCM) expert Pierre Wettergren to write a short guest blog on Bioteams.com to introduce this increasingly critical topic. Over the last 6 months Pierre and I have been collaborating on the design of a customisable BCM Simulation Game for Teams, which we call BCM eMATCH which allows them to run a virtual business and "what-if" the impact of different BCM strategies in response to changes and shocks their market conditions and internal operations.

Bioteams is a modern approach to teams, networks and communities who need to operate with high levels of agility and autonomy through different working practices and by exploiting the latest web2.0 and mobile technologies. Bioteams is based on research into nature's most effective groups and is described in detail in this blog (www.bioteams.com) and in my bioteams book. Here are ten great bioteams exercises you can use to enhance the agility and autonomy of any team:

Knowledge-based SMEs and SMBs (small fish) need to read "The Networked Enterprise (TNE) - competing for the future through Virtual Enterprise Networks (VENs)" with its numerous real examples and proven techniques to find out how to use VENs to develop strategic partnerships with BIG FISH (large enterprises) to propel them to the next level of competitive success. BIG FISH must also use TNE to gain enhanced access to innovation, agility and alternative risk/reward and cost models by partnering with small fish via VENs.

An obvious characteristic of nature's best teams is that they seem to have just the right amount of structure to handle their environments. Too much and they would be slow and cumbersome; too little and they would lack the sophisticated responses to protect their position in the food chain.

Cultivating Team Intelligence provides organizational teams, networks and communities with a much better early warning 'radar' thus enabling them to spot and deal with problems/opportunities sooner.

In this article I suggest that organizational teams, networks and communities who can adapt and adopt the "stop trying to control them" principle exemplified by nature's teams can achieve huge gains in agility and collective intelligence.

Humans and animals do not need complete information to act; they can operate on various clues provided there is a sufficient context. Organizational teams can also use this thin slicing technique in conjunction with short messaging to enhance their performance. Malcolm Gladwell's introspective book Blink digs deep into the abyss of human cognition to illustrate the human ability to think at a subconscious level. The idea of thin slicing is used where one is introduced to only a few snippets of information which lead to a series of conclusions based on moments of rapid cognition - an ability claimed to be intrinsically dormant in most humans. By bioteams guest author Max Bhanabhai.

In the US there has been a movement particularly within the defense and advanced engineering sectors to try to develop more agility in supply chains by working differently with suppliers.

Here is a collection of my 7 most popular articles on collaborative and virtual business networks based on user feedback and page views: