Enterprise crowdfunding offers a series of opportunities for voluntary or unplanned collaborations within organizations. In an enterprise crowdfunding experiment, we study the influence of interpersonal attributes-in-common on collaborations. Using ideas from Homophily Theory and Social Identity Theory, we analyze attributes-in-common in terms of multiple identity facets: of geography, of formal corporate structure, and of working groups/teams. We combine quantitative and self-report data to show how each identity facet has an influence on the likelihood of voluntary collaborations, and we show their "superadditive" combination. We propose new questions for theory, and we consider how our results can lead to new features and technologies to enhance voluntary collaborations in organizations.

The rise of social media in the enterprise has enabled new ways for employees to speak up and communicate openly with colleagues. This rich textual data can potentially be mined to better understand the opinions and sentiment of employees for the benefit of the organization. In this paper, we introduce Enterprise Social Pulse (ESP) -- a tool designed to support analysts whose job involves understanding employee chatter. ESP aggregates and analyzes data from internal and external social media sources while respecting employee privacy. It surfaces the data through a user interface that supports organic results and keyword search, data segmentation and filtering, and several analytics and visualization features. An evaluation of ESP was conducted with 19 Human Resources professionals. Results from a survey and interviews with participants revealed the value and willingness to use ESP, but also surfaced challenges around deploying an employee social media listening solution in an organization.

We describe a first experiment in enterprise crowdfunding - i.e., employees allocating money for employee-initiated proposals at an Intranet site, including a trial of this system with 511 employees in IBM Research. Major outcomes include: employee proposals that addressed diverse individual and organizational needs; high participation rates; extensive inter-departmental collaboration, including the discovery of large numbers of previously unknown collaborators; and the development of goals and motivations based on collective concerns at multiple levels of project groups, communities of practice, and the organization as a whole. We recommend further, comparative research into crowd-funding and other forms of employee-initiated innovations.