Collaboration everywhere?

I recently made a survey on software facilitating enterprise collaboration - one of my favorite topics. It is a booming field, so I found innovative concepts all over the place. Interestingly, startups with office2.0 applications seem to thrive best under the Californian sun. Sure, there is a lot of software developing going on elsewhere too. But also a lot of wondering, why other regions – Australia, South Korea, India… are still lagging behind. There are many reasonable answers, too, including lack of financial support and entrepreneurial mindset. Nevertheless, I was starting to wonder, if Wikinomics might concentrate in the U.S., at least for the time being, for cultural reasons.

Some evidence:

Prasad Kaipa, executive director of the new Centre of Excellence for Leadership, Innovation & Change at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad said about Indian innovation tactics that the focus is on individual learning and creativity combined with very small research-and-development budgets. In the U.S., however, the norm was teamwork and large R&D budgets. (Prasad Kaipa is cited in Business Week “The wisdom of no crowds”.)

In Japan, people love to stay anonymous on the web. Kensuke Furukawa ("Kensuu") , a Japanese web community developer, stated in his presentation on differences between Japanese and American web communities, that the majority of 2ch users are registered by the name of “nanashisan” which means “nameless” (2ch is the biggest bulletin board service in the world according to Kensuu.)

In South Korea, participation has been part of the web long before the term web2.0, "the participatory web" hit the Western world. Openness, however, another element of web2.0 is still weak in South Korea. At least, this is what Seokchan "Channy" Yun, author of Koreacrunch, pointed out in his presentation Why not Web2.0 in Korea.

Cultural differences do not necessarily have to block the spreading of wiki ways of working. Whoever is developing services or software, should simply be aware of these cultural issues, and design accordingly. As always.