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This is an example of Web 2.0. As Philip Evans, senior partner and managing director of The Boston Consulting Group, explained: "Web 2.0 is the Internet as a vehicle for the distributed creation and sharing of information". Evans was speaking at a special Continuous Education Program session at IESE.

The BCG senior partner pointed out that Web 2.0 is less of a new chapter in the Internet's history than a return to its roots. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee established the first successful communication between a client and a server via the Internet at the end of 1990, it was as a medium to share and update information.
 
With over 70 million active users, online communities such as Facebook often grab the headlines, but Evans showed how Web 2.0 matters to "people in general and not just teenagers." One example of the net as a platform for information sharing and collaboration is InnoCentive.

This website creates a meeting point for organizations with a problem (seekers) and a community of engineers, scientists, inventors and business people offering answers (solvers). InnoCentive manages the relationship between the two. "They define precisely who owns the intellectual property at any point," Evans said.

On average, companies have worked internally on a problem for two years before posting it on InnoCentive. A solver cracks it in a third of all cases and in 85 percent of the successful resolutions; the solver comes from a different discipline than the company.

Seekers offer a cash prize for the winning solution but Evans highlighted that solvers' motivation is often not monetary. Instead, the solvers enjoy the applause from cracking the problem or the autonomy to work on an interesting challenge that may be denied them in their "day job."

"Communities are a new, third vehicle for economic activity, for getting things done," he said. It is Web 2.0's ability to tap into this latent rather than explicit knowledge, along with the usability of its technical applications that makes it a powerful tool in Enterprise 2.0.

For example, Procter & Gamble, one of the world's largest consumer goods manufacturers, now sources half of its new product ideas from outside the company. "This is dirt cheap as there is no management involved and it is an enormously popular way of working with young people," he said.

As Web 2.0 initiatives allow companies to tap into its latent knowledge base, Evans envisages that "maybe people will show that they know what to do better than the managers."

As a result, the Internet as a platform for information sharing and collaboration could "redefine the role of management from top-down to gardening" and herald the era of the manager as "the gardener, not the engineer."