New emotion-sensing technologies can help employees make better decisions, improve concentration, alleviate stress, and adopt healthier and more productive work styles. But companies must address important privacy issues.

Enabled by enterprise social software (ESS), online corporate communities are shaking up the management world by revolutionizing many core organizational activities. By creating new channels of interaction among employees, customers and managerial echelons, ESS solutions are democratizing the decision-making process. Many prominent companies see this favourably, which is why they actively use ESS platforms such as Yammer — a private social network that helps employees collaborate across departments, locations and business apps — to transform innovation, talent management, marketing and CSR practices. But democracy in business is a double-edged sword. And when it comes to empowering the corporate masses to heavily influence the decision-making process via ESS, it remains unclear when the C-suite benefits and when it doesn’t. <br><br> This article aims to raise awareness of the perils associated with decision democratization and help managers identify the conditions in which ESS platforms complement the decision-making process and those conditions in which online communities fall short in making a true contribution. We provide a framework to discuss the optimum role of ESS platform functionality for three different types of decision making: operational, tactical and strategic. Our research indicates that there is no question that ESS should indeed be exploited for some intra-firm decision making, but that companies need to be very wary of democratizing the strategic decision-making process.

What prompts people to come up with their best ideas? Even Steve Jobs, renowned for his digital evangelism, recognized the importance of social interaction in achieving innovation. As CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, Jobs explicitly instructed the architect of Pixar's new headquarters to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges released creative juices that fueled innovation. Empirical studies confirm what Jobs intuitively knew. The more diverse a person's social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative. A diverse network provides exposure to people from different fields who behave and think differently. Can Twitter make employees more innovative? Does having more diversity in one's virtual connections mean that good ideas are more likely to surface, as in the face-to-face world? To answer this question, the authors analyzed employee Twitter networks. EMC Corporation, a leading company in the information storage and infrastructure industry, was one of the five companies the authors studied, analyzing hundreds of ideas submitted by EMC employees. The researchers found that, while Twitter users and non-users generally submitted the same number of ideas, the ideas of Twitter users were rated significantly more positively by other employees and experts than the ideas of non-users. The researchers also found that there was a positive relationship between the amount of diversity in one's Twitter network and the quality of ideas submitted. However, the authors argue that just exposing oneself to diverse fields, opinions and beliefs on Twitter by itself is not sufficient to enhance innovativeness. Additional capabilities are needed to ensure that the ideas triggered via Twitter would be transformed into real innovative outcomes. A critical ability is individual absorptive capacity -the ability of employees to identify, assimilate and exploit new ideas.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Genzyme, General Electric and Intel are often credited with having attained market leadership through open innovation strategies. By tapping into and exploiting the technological knowledge that resided beyond their own R&D structures, these companies outmaneuvered rivals. But while other organizations try to follow their example, this research shows that many are failing because they neglect to ensure that the outside ideas reach the people best equipped to exploit them. R&D leaders need to think not only about combing the outside world for new and potentially applicable ideas but also about how to ensure that those ideas receive serious consideration. By understanding the roles of two types of innovation brokers -"idea scouts" and "idea connectors"-in the open innovation process, and by utilizing their talents effectively, managers can preside over major improvements in the conversion of external knowledge into successful outcomes. The authors provide numerous examples, pointing out that success at open innovation depends on the presence of both types of innovation brokers. But despite these innovation brokers'importance to the organization, the people who wound up as idea scouts and connectors often came as a complete surprise to management. Innovation is too important to be left to chance, however. If innovation brokers do not exist, management is obliged to "invent" them -i.e., recruit the right people to perform these valuable roles.