I'm excited to post my first article on this fascinating blog. I run the platform, product, and marketing efforts for a relatively new company called nGenera. What's particularly interesting about this blog's topic is that our two primary products, nGen Customer and nGen Talent, are very representative of the two New Age Of Innovation concepts, N=1, R=G.

The focus of nGen Customer is to provide technology and tools that enable companies to create and deliver a distinctive and personalized customer experience -- yes, N=1. And nGen Talent is about finding, developing, and deploying talent on demand. A big part of “finding” involves global sourcing. I view this as two concepts in one: (a) the talent you need is not necessarily within the four walls of your company, and (b) the talent you seek could be anywhere in the world. This is R=G.

We see examples of this everywhere today -- in Wikinomics , author Don Tapscott explores the topic extensively and cites companies like InnoCentive as successful efforts to productize the R=G phenomenon. I personally like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk -- a clever site that uses a micropayment approach to outsourcing low-value but necessary tasks.

Tapscott, whose consulting company New Paradigm was acquired by nGenera last year, was talking to a group of us about a new way of looking at the talent in your company -- in place of the familiar "Intel Inside," he coined the phrase "Talent Outside." I can't agree more that the talent you need to perform certain tasks will frequently exist outside of your organization -- so the new HR imperative is about developing the competency to find, engage, compensate, and measure outside talent as much as HR's priority is dealing with a company's own employees.

In my next article, I’ll describe a "tagging" concept we’re using to identify which employees in our company can perform certain skills. This is nothing new -- we've all been doing skills inventories for decades. But this is an opt-in approach, and focuses on skills irrespective of where in the organization an individual sits. What's more, it's a construct that we'll begin turning outward -- letting people outside of the company participate and be considered for talent needs.

Please pardon the references to my company. I'm trying to set context here, and will focus in the future entirely on the concepts and customer encounters we’ve had with the N=1 and R=G theorems.