Some time ago I read an article (sorry,only in Finnish) about a young and talented professor Aino Kianto (née Poyhonen) who has developed a new method for researching organisations ability to renew themselves. The method is named ORCI (Organizational Renewal Capability Index) and it’s based on interviews among the corporate employees.

This together with a blog entry (sorry, again only in Finnish) by Elina Hiltunen lead me to think more of this topic about organisations’ renewal and preparing for the future. Within this context one particular idea keeps on popping to my mind so I guess it’s about time to share it with you all.

In the age of Internet one important and potentially overlooked source of insight could be the bookmarks of the employees. For example, I myself have the habit of bookmarking all of the interesting sites I bump into, either on purpose or by accident. Currently my del.icio.us favorites list has exactly 269 entries, most of which, I dare say, would be of interest also to someone else within my organisation.

Imagine a situation where the employees of a particular company would build up a network at del.icio.us or somewhere else and share their favorites with each other. What a vast repository of weak signals, opportunities and insight that would be! Add to that some functionality from StumbleUpon and you wouldn’t for sure need to worry about having too little paths to follow. I don’t know if someone somewhere has already done something like this or even developed some state-of-the-art products but I’m really tempted to test it with a limited group here at work. Who would volunteer?

Another interesting view to this is that of research, like the ones of Ms Kianto’s and Ms Hiltunen’s. It’d be interesting to e.g. count the number of bookmarks of the employees of a certain companies and then compare that to the financial performance of the same set of companies. Would there be some connection? Donno, but for sure would like to know.