Ontario Centres of Excellence

Social Network

The Challenge

As part of its mission to help bring innovations to market, Ontario Centres of Excellence must encourage close collaboration among its members. However, at any given time, half of them are out in the field, looking for the next great innovation in Ontario’s schools, hospitals and businesses.

It’s difficult to get people within the same building to collaborate, let alone dozens spread across an entire province. Our task: create a way to make collaboration work among geographically dispersed OCE members.

Our Solution

Beyond the obvious hurdle of physical distance, we had to defeat many other enemies of collaboration: schedules that didn’t mesh, phone and email messages that cut people out of the loop, even the natural isolation that people feel when they’re not in close contact with other team members.

To defeat these unnatural barriers, we created AccessOCE, a custom-built, dedicated social network. It allowed OCE members to put faces to names, find colleagues, share common interests, post articles, build on ideas, form specific project groups and collaborate publicly – all in real time.