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Knowledge Assimilation 75

Ross Mayfield, founder and CEO of Socialtext, a social collaboration platform for businesses, ■ EMPLOYEES AS CHANGE AGENTS
noted the following on his blog:

• One percent of customer conversations are assimilated as organizational knowledge.
• Nine percent of customer conversations touch the organization, but no learning occurs.
• Ninety percent of customer conversations never touch the organization.
This data is excerpted from Greg Oxton at the Consortium for Service Innovation (CSI). You can
review the entire blog post here:

http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/crm-iceberg.html

If the degree to which businesses fail to assimilate knowledge is even close to
what Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield has noted in his blog—that only about 1% of all
customer conversations result in new organizational knowledge while 90% of the con-
versations never even reach the business—the actual loss through missed opportunities
to innovate and address customer issues is huge. Turned around, if only a small gain in
knowledge sharing and assimilation were made—if every tenth rather than every hun-
dredth customer (the current assessment of typical practices) who offered up an idea
was actually heard and understood and welcomed into the organization as a contribut-
ing member—the change in workplace and marketplace dynamics would be profound.
In a practical sense, you’d have uncovered a source of real competitive advantage. As
noted, Starbucks is implementing, on average, 2 customer driven innovations per week
since 2008. Take a look at its stock price over that period and ask yourself if these are
perhaps related.

This is exactly what is happening with the “ideation” tools used not only by
Starbucks and Dell, but by an increasing number of businesses and nonprofit organiza-
tions. Tapping customers directly, and visibly involving them in the collaborative pro-
cess of improving and evolving products and services is taking hold. Chapter 12 treats
ideation and its use in business in detail.

Social Source Commons: Nonprofit Resources

A current listing of collaboration tools—with a particular relevance for nonprofit organiza-
tions—is maintained at the Social Source Commons:

http://socialsourcecommons.org/tag/collaboration