It’s Glasgow for Business Week at the moment, a “tour de force of positive thinking for those running or starting a business” according to its billing, and it’s great. We have a white double decker bus – the ambition bus – touring the town and a whole stack of free events aimed at boosting business in the city. For me, it just reinforces why Glasgow was the right place to run Social Media Week earlier this year. Many of those that engaged with Social Media Week are taking part in this week’s activities, like our friends at Think Different Business Banter who have been running their popular networking events each morning. There is appetite, drive, and curiosity a plenty in Glasgow alongside entrepreneurialism and a great spirit of collaboration.
Collaboration has been a common theme this past week. Last Friday I attended the launch of Entrepreneurial Spark, a fascinating social enterprise that is designed to offer free office space and facilities to embryonic businesses in a collaborative space where the participants have maximum opportunity to work with, and learn from, each other. It’s an incubator in the best sense of the word and made possible through the generosity of people like Willie Haughey, returning opportunity and purpose to his local community, and the vision and drive of Saltire Fellow Jim Duffy to make it happen. Well done and good luck to them
On Monday I was at Govcamp Scotland where Zachary Tumin talked about the book he has written with William Bratton called Collaborate or Perish! Its message is that collaboration is, and will continue to be, the key to success and sustainability. I agree and find that the mindset and ethic that is fuelling the widespread adoption of social media means that this approach will progressively embed itself as both possible and desirable.
Increasingly we will see agile groups and individuals coming together to deliver projects and remaining in a grouping for long enough to get things done then dispersing and reforming into new collaborations. It is agile, robust, innovative and efficient, and has a Schumpterian touch to it that would have us believe it also is highly creative. Don Tapscott, curator of the forthcoming Social Media Week and keynote speaker at Social Media Week Glasgow 2011, is of course the prophet of collaboration at all levels and has understood that its time has come. We have both the ethic and the technical ability to do it, we simply need to apply it to resolve the problems and challenges we face.
It was particularly interesting then to attend an event that was part of Glasgow for Business Week hosted by an organisation called Cooperative Development Scotland (CDS). CDS is a body that offers advice to those that want to build a co-operative business model for an organisation. They will guide you through the process, including access to funding and legal models.
Now cooperatives are not new, but interestingly perhaps their time has come because when allied to the appetite for collaboration and the appetite for a more democratic and more equitable distribution of the fruits of our work, as demonstrated through the occupy and 99% movements, it becomes a compelling model. I know of several individual companies and organisations that have formed a cooperative vehicle in order to pitch for work, deliver complex projects, to purchase more effectively and just love the idea of remaining an independent organisation but part of a larger group that is both democratic, equitable and risk dampening. Interestingly the UN has declared 2012 The International Year of Coops.
The link between cooperatives and social media was a connection we identified long ago and was highlighted in films like Us Now. For a more prosaic and local idea of how co-ops can be powerful collaborative tools in business you might also want the short CDS film and in the spirit of collaboration I share this with you here.
