Over the last few days, I attended a Jive user group meeting and the May NY Tech Meetup.

I’ve written before about Jive. I believe their approach to social business has the potential to unlock great value—especially across big, global organizations—by changing how people work.

A selection of cases provided by one member company at the meeting showed a number of easy wins to be had by crossing silos, eliminating waste, incentivizing change, reducing duplication of effort, and streamlining communication. More importantly, Jive, in this user’s >$35 billion company, has clearly become an incubator for innovation—creating an environment where it’s easy to try new things, see if they work, and then either get behind them or move on. The freedom to test and experiment helps support a culture of innovation.

For many big, global companies, this is a tough thing to do. Too often, innovation gets relegated to formal programs that become their own slow-moving bureaucracy. Not so with this small team that is quickly driving change and innovation across a >$35 billion company.

And not so, at NY Tech Meetup (NYTM). This was my first time attending this event—700 people at NYU’s Skirball Center listened to eight teams present just-launched or about-to-launch digital products. The audience was engaged, responsive, and impressed. I was blown away by the creativity and energy shown by these entrepreneurs and how quickly they are moving to realize and test their ideas.

I thought there were a couple of note-worthy points about this event:

• questions about business model are frowned upon—in this forum, the point is not to talk about how to make money (though I’m sure that’s considered elsewhere); the discussion is about what’s fun, cool, creative, clever, useful. This helps create a culture of innovation.

• If you’re in “old” media, or any entrenched, big-infrastructure company, the barriers to entry are dropping away. Somewhere, a team of innovative technologists is thinking about how to eat your lunch for a relatively small investment—and they may not even know or care that it’s your lunch.

Driven by technology, more disruptive innovation is just around the bend. Companies that think they are secure for whatever reason—key account relationships, authors, superior product, infrastructure, geography—should stop and think about how a small innovative team would disrupt their business:

What legacy issues would a start-up avoid? How would they handle opportunity? How could innovation be unleashed? How will they connect with customers?  How might a start-up collaborate better? How might they change the value proposition?

For me, these two events highlighted both the threat and opportunity that technology offers global publishers and other large companies. On one hand, NY Tech Meetup highlighted the pace of tech-driven innovation that could quickly disrupt established markets (or disrupt those markets further). Jive’s user group meeting illustrated how big companies can use technology to drive change and move more quickly to use their vast resources in order to be more competitive and innovative.