In “In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?”, Malcom Gladwell describes how Intellectual Ventures works to bring together really smart people from different disciplines -physicians, physicists, inventors – in the hopes of generating a vast number of profitable patents. The company puts a group of creative, inventive people in the same room and patiently records their collective output – in one case recording thirty-six inventions during the course of a single dinner.

What Intellectual Ventures does might seem obvious – pay some luminaries to collaborate and, naturally, genius will flow forth. But what’s more important then who was invited to these innovation sessions, is that they were invited at all. Cross domain collaboration is uncommon – just look around your organization. How often does HR interact with IT? Marketing and R&D? Infrequently, at best.

To enable innovation, managers must allow staff with divergent perspectives to come together in the pursuit of a shared objective – in the case of Intellectual Ventures, generating novel patent applications and then licensing the resulting portfolio. But, for your organization, enabling innovation is just as important – allowing all its members, regardless of which silo in which the org chart claims they reside, to innovate is the clearest way to move your organization forward, more closely align it with the marketplace, and realize critical efficiencies.

Gladwell’s central thesis is that innovation and discovery do not necessarily come from geniuses, but are “…products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” Intellectual Ventures realize that by allowing people with vastly different backgrounds and expertise to look at the same problem, by creating an atmosphere conducive to innovation, discoveries inevitably occur.

Geniuses still have a role, but they are often people who prove particularly adept at harnessing the available information and using that as a basis for their innovation. “The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight”.

So the lesson is: “Insight (can) be orchestrated”. Want to create the right intellectual climate for innovation? Make each of your employees efficient insight generators? Allow them to connect, to discover one another, and to have insight into your organization’s activities.

This is where Enterprise 2.0 hold promise. Enterprise social networking tools like Sonar connect employees around themes and competencies. Wikis like Confluence allow staff from differing business domains to quickly see what each other are working on. Tie it all together with enterprise search, and the result is a connected enterprise, where all perspectives can be brought into the same virtual “room”. Create an environment like this, and watch innovation flourish.

Want more of my Management 2.0 rants? See: Adding Enterprise 2.0 to the Corporate DNA

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