Diversity Drives Innovation #ILTA12

Today starts our week-long coverage of ILTA 12. Though the International Legal Technology Association brings together a variety of legal professionals, the focus of this year’s conference relates to most, if not all of us in the enterprise — Act, Collaborate to Drive Change (AC2DC).

At the Corner of Diversity & Innovation

This morning’s keynote address, which featured Frans Johansson, author of "The Medici Effect”, laid a foundation for what the next few days are likely to bring, namely innovation at the intersection of disciplines and cultures. Mr. Johansson highlighted the different ways different companies have either embraced or foiled a culture of innovation to make inspired, meaningful changes to the way they work, develop and distribute products and services.

Mr. Johansson says that diversity drives innovation. Whether it is a diversity of culture, generations or experiences, when people of different backgrounds come together, the potential for innovation is at its greatest. Of course, it usually doesn’t start that way, because we usually refuse what we don’t understand. However, if you think about it from the perspective of innovation, consider Mr. Johansson’s facts about innovation:

• #1 all new ideas are combination of existing ideas.
• #2 people who change the world try far more ideas
• #3 Diverse teams can unleash an explosion of new ideas

At the intersection of culture we come up with better ideas, which is the reason why, when you embrace diversity, it can drive innovation.

Become Enabled to Make Things Better

How is this useful to you, the legal professional or enterprise worker? No matter what we do or at what level in our company we operate, we can leverage diversity of our organizations for new insights. We can use technology to drive (not just serve) new business models. We can make it easier to collaborate with everybody. Empowered employee meet diversity.

Find New Ways to Collaborate

How much innovation can you draw from a photo of a Formula One pit stop crew? Johansson asked audience members to stand up and discuss with the person beside us about how we can collaborate better based on information we gleaned from a photo.

In 3 minutes the person next to me and I came up with a few interesting ideas. Imagine if we doubled or even tripled the amount of time — 12 minutes at most? What if you and your colleagues spent 12 minutes a day or a week trying to figure out solutions to problems — how far would you get? What ideas could be dreamed up? How many of them can be useful?

Find New Ways to Be Inspired

If you truly want to drive change, find a way to think differently about things. Find a way to work together with new people, with new perspectives and see what can happen. Of course, this is a legal technology conference, so while it's great to start the first day with a sense of discovery and unlimited possibility, it's important to keep it real.

Many firms are still struggling to adapt to new types of new technology, never mind ready to drastically change how they work. Hopefully, however, Mr. Johansson's wisdom will stay alive throughout the week, reminding us that it's not the technology that's broken, it's our culture that needs to be fixed.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Google Invests In Electronic Signature Vendor DocuSign

If electronic signature has never been one of the sexier components of cloud computing and not attracted much media coverage, we’ve watched interest in it grow steadily over the past three years. The announcement by Google that it is investing in DocuSign suggests that e-signatures are about to become a lot more interesting.

Google, DocuSign

To be more precise, Google Venture, Google's investment arm,  is investing in DocuSign, which has launched a Series D funding round to continue its ongoing expansion.

DocuSign, if you're not familiar with it, is a San Francisco-based e-signature company that has been developing and marketing its products since 2003, and which now has offices in Seattle and London.

Clearly Google can sense a change in the air for electronic signing. It joins Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures and SAP Ventures in the funding round which has been led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. DocuSign says it has raised US$ 55.7 million so far, although it hasn't specified how much Google invested.

But let’s get back to electronic signatures and the cloud. While cloud development has attracted a great deal of attention in the past couple of years, so too have the concerns many companies have around cloud security.

Sometimes the fears were justified and sometimes they were built on a lack of understanding of how the cloud works and what the potential risks actually are.

The result is that many companies were reluctant to send sensitive documents into the cloud or complete business transactions there.

Cloud-based E-Signature

However, there is evidence that suggests this is changing. Companies are now happy to go the cloud route, even if it’s only because of the perceived lower costs of cloud-based software as opposed to on-premises software.

This is where electronic signature vendors are finding their niche: companies that want to go whole hog and do business in the cloud need legally verifiable signatures that can be sent through the cloud.

DocuSign has been building that business from the start and as cloud and social business become increasingly popular, so too will electronic signatures and the companies that provide that capability.

For DocuSign this has translated into considerable growth.

According to its own figures, 60,000 new users are joining the DocuSign Global Network every day, and 20 million users have DocuSigned more than 150 million documents in 188 countries.

DocuSign says it will use the cash to grow its SaaS platform, to accelerate international expansion and invest in more research.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com