With the unprecedented growth of the Internet as the medium of communication, knowledge has become the new source of wealth, and the sharing of knowledge through collaboration, the key to the success of today's organization. Unfortunately, the mindset of most business people is not one of cooperation but of competition. This all-too-pervasive attitude is the major barrier to the successful implementation of knowledge management (KM) systems. In this article, we address the critical question of how to foster a spirit of cooperation among coworkers, suppliers, and customers through understanding and applying the communication principles of the Internet to create the Collaborative Organization. It is only through collaboration, through knowledge sharing and knowledge co-creation that an organization can tap into all of its knowledge held collectively by its employees, its customers, its suppliers and its business partners. In order for that to happen there are two conditions to be met. One is technical and fairly easy to achieve. It is simply creating an Internet or browser based environment, a knowledge network, in which information and knowledge can be communicated, shared, stored, organized, and created. An example of a knowledge network is presented. The second condition is the creation of an environment of trust, teamwork and collaboration and the promotion of emotional intelligence. It also entails developing a new style of learning one suited for collaboration and not just individual achievement. The Internet is reshaping collaboration and therefore one of the goals of this article to understand how this is taking place and how it can be taken advantage of. If we are going to be able to understand how organizations can develop collaboration strategies we must understand what underlies the success of the Internet as a collaborative medium, a success, by the way, that was not managed but rather developed spontaneously. We make use of the insights of Marshall McLuhan who showed that a medium has a certain effect on its users independent of its content, which he expressed with his famous aphorism, "The medium is the message." We show that the Internet, which is a hybrid technology of telephony and computing, has a unique set of five properties or characteristics ("messages," if you will) that, taken together, make it the ideal medium for collaboration and knowledge networking. They are: - the two-way flow of information - the ease and speed of access of information - continuous learning - alignment and integration of common objectives - the creation of community No other communication medium prior to the Internet possessed all five of these properties to the same extent (although certain media possess some of these properties), all of which are necessary (and sufficient) for creating a successful collaborative organization. This is what makes the Internet the ideal vehicle for collaboration. As a consequence we regard the Internet as both a medium for and a model of collaboration. And it is with that in mind that we have crafted our study to describe the nature of a collaborative organization and, more importantly, how to build one.

About the Author(s)

Dr. Logan obtained his B.S. from M.I.T. in 1961 and his Ph.D. also from M.I.T. in 1965. He spent two years at U. of Illinois as a research associate and came to the University of Toronto in 1967. He is an Associate Professor of Physics. He is a member of the board of the McLuhan Program at U of T. He is cross-appointed to the Curriculum Department of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where he conducts research in computer applications in education and the social impacts of technology and communications. Dr. Logan is the author of three books on communications cum linguistics: The Alphabet Effect (Wm. Morrow, 1986) and The Fifth Language (Stoddart, 1995). His latest book which is an update of The Fifth Language is The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age (Stoddart Press, Toronto, May 2000).