communication

The 4 Rules for Success with Global Teams

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer and Social Media Manager, IRI

Technology lets us do amazing things. Where once a research and development (R&D) team needed to be located in the same facility in order to collaborate, today, the sight of engineers collaborating with globally distributed coworkers via IT tools is quite common. But this dispersion of staff poses challenges of its own. For instance, when you have yet to meet one of your co-workers in person, how do you develop trust with her? When you share an office space it’s easy to casually pass along concerns, observations, insights, or interesting findings to your colleagues around a water cooler. Is it possible to replicate this with global teams? Not really. So communication is dampened on a global team. Based on research at the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), these challenges have been studied and some general rules about building a successful global team have been laid out. Continue reading →

How to Get More (and Better) Crowdsource Competitions Participants

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer & Social Media Manager, IRI

Let’s face it, the number of crowdsource competitions blooming into existence these days is staggering; almost too many to choose from. This is normal, of course, for any research practice that proves itself an effective method for solving problems quickly. But there’s a downside: with so many competitions to choose from, people who would normally participate in many competitions will, over time, become more selective. Why should they choose yours?

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Where Do You Live?

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By Jim Euchner, VP of Global Innovation, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., RTM Editor-in-Chief

Where do you live? By this, I mean where do you spend your time?

I realized recently that many of the people who coexist with me in my physical world actually live in different places. I spend much of my workday in web conferences. Many teams in my organization communicate among themselves using WhatsApp—they live chunks of their work lives in WhatsApp. I connect with my wife face to face or by phone. One of my sons doesn’t answer his phone; he only texts. Another lives his social life within his multiplayer online video games; the game space is where he connects with friends to get together in physical space.

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