Right now we are experiencing a mini boom in the proliferation of collaboration focused tech tools. There is a sense of a race currently underway, with major players pouring resources into collaboration tools and starts-ups cropping up everywhere. I see that as a good thing because it also means that, with readily available technological infrastructure for collaboration, people will start to recognise that collaboration is fast becoming a default way of solving problems and creating value. Best of all is that it will also increase the chances of the innovation boom that normally happens with collaboration. Here is this week’s selection of recommended reading which includes insights into emerging collaboration technologies.

Sincere thanks to those who have suggested articles for this edition of Roadmender Recommends.

Quiz: What’s Your Collaboration Style?

In every workplace, there are colleagues you naturally work well with, and others with whom you never seem to see eye-to-eye. That’s because everyone approaches teamwork differently — and your mindset isn’t always going to match up with others’. Working well as a team means knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, and how they mesh or clash with those of your colleagues. To help workers discover their personal collaboration style, Web-conferencing software provider PGi created a list of five different “personalities” and what they bring to the table, along with tips on how to best work with other types on the team. Find your own style by reading the statements below and determining which ones you most closely identify with…READ ON

How collaboration on data and technology is making medicine smarter

Big data is more commonly associated with helping business make more profit but researchers are reaping enormous benefits in health care and medicine. The convergence of technology and healthcare is creating opportunities across disciplines, creating partnerships and breakthroughs. The first step to getting the most out of big data is to get the data itself…READ ON

The Open Web Platform’s Future Hinges on Standards Innovation & Collaboration

How is the current generation of Internet technologies advancing the Open Web Platform? This is the question that W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) contributor Philippe le Hegaret recently sought to address in his Web Applications column. According to Hegaret, tremendous work is being done to advance the Web Platform but there are many fronts that are still in need of sustained development. Among them, Hegaret suggests, are persistent background processing, frame rate performance data, and metadata associated with a web application or mitigating cross-site attacks, just to name a few. The deployment of HTML5 has been a tremendous boon for the Open Web Platform, but Hegaret insists that “it’s not quite there yet.” Clearly, as Internet technologies continue to pour forth at a dizzying pace, keeping the Open Web at the forefront of innovation is an undeniably…READ ON

‘No more crossed wires’: how open innovation is born from company collaboration

The launch of the EU’s European Data Portal (EDP) this week marks a significant commitment to improving open data innovation across Europe. EDP was launched by the European Commission (with the Connecting Europe Facility framework), to support the deployment of European open data infrastructures, from data publishing to re-use. With over 240,000 open datasets from 32 countries and topics ranging from science to justice, EDP supports a new generation of products and services. However, as the ODI advocates, open innovation is a journey that begins with culture change. As a member of the EDP consortium, the ODI partnered with Sponge UK, a leading eLearning developer, to produce a series of open data educational modules to support users of the platform. These bite-size…READ ON

Why a Strong Sense of Purpose Fuels the Innovation Process

At our recent offsite, the Harvard Business Review Group asked one of our long time contributors to talk to us about innovation. His name is Vijay Govindarajan, the Coxe Distinguished professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Govindarajan is an expansive thinker who is probably best known for his insights into how companies create new offerings–especially big, established corporations such as GE. OK, we’re not as big as GE, but at HBR we certainly worry about our heritage and brand. The question is, how do we respect our brand’s identity, but keep trying new things to expand our options for tomorrow? No easy task. And we’re not the only ones facing it. This is the central problem…READ ON

DocuCollab wins TNW USA’s Boost startup competition

After a day full of great presentations from 24 startups, the TNW team has selected a winner for its Boost competition (a partnership with PayPal): DocuCollab. If you haven’t been keeping up with us on Twitter, DocuCollab is what you’d expect from its name: a platform for simplifying collaboration on documents. In a relatively crowded space with Google Docs, Office Online, and now Dropbox, DocuCollab differentiates itself thanks to the level of access control it provides. Most notably, permission can be set down to individual paragraphs for team members, while team leaders have access to the full shebang…READ ON

Microsoft Graph turns Office into New Collaboration Resource

Software giant encourages developers to connect applications to its rich, contextual data. In July, Microsoft injected new life into its operating system franchise with Windows 10, reimagining how its software is updated and sold for an always-on computing era. One of its biggest selling points: applications designed for the new OS that can run seamlessly on desktop computers, tablets and smartphones…READ ON