Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
When I started my appointment at my new company, I was already a member of the local FabLab and a lot - or the majority of the active members - were also employed by this company or about to be hired. We met in the evenings and exchanged ideas and knowledge about the machineries we had in our lab. And of course we recommended talents back to our company.
Soon after, I realized that there is also a Lab at my company, equipped with the best machines, money can buy - but you guess it - deserted, especially in the evenings, when all the employees of the company meet up with lemonade in our local FabLab.
I went to other cities, same situation, even the drivers for these communities are employees from this company, extraordinarily well organized and motivated.
And I wondered why. Why are people engaged after work in topics in which they could be engaged much better at work? Do they have missing opportunities? And why doesn’t the company skim this power of their staff and doesn’t encourage these people to engage outside work?
For me various possibilities are obvious for the company to engage in these communities with trainings, material and especially with teaming activities to generate ideas, gain insight, to check out, do some early tests and develop blueprints of activities that can later be internalized and drive successful mass products. Or have you ever seen a FabLab producing on an industrial level?
For sure the communities will only accept cooperations on an open source level, but why should this be a barrier for successful products for this company? Quite contrary, imagine the development costs that could be saved, or testing costs. For example, NASA has shown this with the Rover, which is open sourced and tested by the community, a real success story. And recently also a fuel cell prototype of a bike was developed in the community.
A good example that I had noticed was the engagement of the company in the card 10 on CCCamp2019, a sensor based watch, with a sponsored sensor on it, along with a great person from this company giving training sessions, how to program this sensor with micro-python.
But I also noticed much higher levels of community engagement in other companies. For example Ritter Sport or FESTO that gave sponsorship and support to big big community endeavors.
Making this observations, the wish for change grew within me and this is why my new WOL Circle at this company has the topic “Corporate Social Mind” and my goal (or my long-term aim) is to change and strengthen the companies engagement in open communities for the good of both, the community and the company and I feel like I’m in best alignment with the former founder of this company who would have loved the sentence:
Making money by doing good.