How you feed your Ecosystem

All of us are potential teachers and learners – in a collaborative environment we are both.

Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-

	Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Participants	Business Partners	Various (Partners, Customers, ISVs, Developers, System Integrators, VARs, etc.)
Purpose	Means to an end (Sales, Service and Support)	Way of life (Innovation, More Product, Reach and Scope, etc.)
Relationship	Business, Formal	Trusted, Collaborative
Communication	Mostly one way	Dialogue
Knowledge Sharing	Training	Peer Learning beside necessary Training
Problem solving	Mostly individual groups; limited sharing	Work with peers to solve the problem; and share learning with the world to follow suit
Process	Provide necessary steps to deal with the fiefdoms	Transparency
Technology	Phone, Email, Fax	Wiki, Blog, Forum, Bulletin Board, Youtube, etc. beside conventional means
Use of Web	Limited	Social. Can one live without it now?
World view	World is round	World is flat

For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives - closed/traditional source software or open source software – the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues.