Thursday 15 May 2014

Can we achieve a good coaching relationship with only texts or emails?


ecoachpro

Today I had the pleasure to speak at some length about the e-coaching process proposed by e-CoachPro with one of the founders of e-CoachPro, Anne Ribbers.

Anne Ribbers and Alexander Waringa created e-CoachPro as a platform to support the training, accreditation of text based e-coaches, and the following client engagement on a remote basis. Backed by a research grant from the Dutch government the eCoachPro team have researched writing based coach to client interaction for leadership development purposed.

Take a look at the new English translated site for eCoachPro.

Although many e-Coaches use telephone, video coaching (via Skype for example), Anne has seen coaches who have ceased to use video coaching after experiencing the strong, productive relationships developed with clients using this flexible written word only approach.

Is Open Innovation still a useful concept?



6 years or more ago Oxford Innovation was engaged in a process of encouraging Open Innovation awareness through the Innovation Advisory Service in the South East of England, UK.

Recently I have been wondering if Open Innovation was now so well known that it didn't need to be a leading topic for discussion. I was wrong to think that because despite increased awareness of the term Open Innovation it is still not always fully understood and there are many businesses yet to act in on it's concepts. Often only a small part of the Open Innovation concept is taken on board as shown in this report on Managing Open Innovation in Large Firms by Chesbrough and Brunswicker.


For a more recent consideration of Open "social" innovation take a look at this webpage at the Nansen Neuroscience Network in Norway.

My view is that there is much still to be gained by understanding and implementing the principles of Open Innovation and many businesses are still to benefit from the concept by implementing it fully - particularly in the area of exploiting unused internal IP.