Monthly Archives: December 2009

Open Innovation at Crowdspring

December 23, 2009 by Jurjan Huisman | 1 Comment

In a true entrepreneurial spirit, quite a number of employees at Innovation Factory have their own side projects which they work on in the weekends and evenings. For one of those projects, Green at Work (in which I participate), a logo needed to be designed. It was done through Crowdspring, a crowd-sourcing platform. Even the seemingly simple process of having a logo designed by a crowd has many aspects of open innovation to it. I would like to share the experience with you and place it in the context of idea management.

Crowdspring

Clear question
First of all, the logo design contest was initiated on Crowdspring.com with a preset running time of two weeks. To start a contest, Crowdspring has a submission form to describe your briefing. Their template takes you through a number of steps: You need to supply background information, what you need, who your target audience is, what kind of designs you like, and things you absolutely do or don’t want to have in your design. Before we started we observed that good briefings at other contests resulted in higher quality contributions so we took our time to write a good briefing.

Good feedback
It is vital to give supportive feedback to the people that contribute to your challenge. This feedback results in a higher quantity and quality of new submissions. This stems from the fact that people enrich each other’s designs based upon your feedback. Imagine one specific designer submits a design at Crowdspring and gets feedback from you that a specific element is really cool but another element definitely needs to be changed. If this happens a couple of times with different designs, new entrants will be better directed towards the type of design that you like. So in the end, people build upon each other’s submissions to come to higher quality submissions. In the end we received 197 design submissions of which the quality kept improving during the process.

Scout the community for input
You should scout through the profiles of the community members to find people you think can make a good contribution. We did this soon after we started our design challenge. We went through other design challenges and looked for designs that we liked and sent messages to the designers to tell them we liked their previous designs and asked them to participate in our challenge. Our eventual winner was someone we found in this way.

Diversity boosts creativity
Another great aspect of a community like Crowdspring is the fact that it’s members come from all over the world and have different backgrounds. Sure, they all do something with design, but compared to one specific design agency it’s a very diverse group. The resulting creative contributions are absolutely amazing. We selected the following design from a Japanese designer named Kiona:

Green_at_Work

Self-regulation within the community
At a certain point in the contest, one Crowdspring member even sent us a message that he found a similarity in one of the design submissions. He noticed that one of the submissions in our contest was a slightly altered copy of a submission from a different designer at a previous project. Obviously, copying is a complete no-go in a design process. So the community even helps to keep the contest ‘clean’. This is something that is hardly do-able without those extra hundreds pairs of eyes.

Idea management
In general, when you ask a community a question you leverage the principle: nobody is as smart as everybody. Specifically when you involve a diverse group. But when an organisation sets up idea management one should realise that resources should be made available to coordinate the process. In a previous blogpost “Implementing Idea Management” we concluded that implementing effective idea management is about asking the right people the right questions. A significant amount of time should be spent getting the questions right. While supplying feedback to idea generators can improve the quality of a specific idea and motivates them to keep submitting ideas that constantly increase in quality. This feedback and motivation is part of community management, a crucial element within idea management.

An idea challenge normally runs for a specific amount of time (compared to open ended idea management) and is focussed around a specific subject.

Crowd-sourced design process in the context of idea management
Because of our experience at Innovation Factory with idea challenges we could see the potential upfront to leverage a community like Crowdspring where the diverse background of its members contributes to a very creative logo. I find it really interesting to see that the above mentioned crowd-sourced design process has a lot of similarities with an idea challenge:

  1. Clear question. It is very important to state a well thought out briefing as this gives direction. At an idea challenge the way you formulate your question is identically crucial. Also a set timing of two weeks helps the “sense of urgency” of contributors to submit a design quickly rather than postponing it. Idea challenges also run best for a set time.
  2. Good feedback. From our experience with idea challenges we know that it is absolutely vital to give constructive and fast feedback. As a result you get more and higher quality contributions.
  3. Scout the community for input. Part of the community management activities we perform at idea challenges consists of looking through member profiles to see if their experience and knowledge matches a specific idea. We then contact those people to ask if they can contribute to the idea. This proactive moderation activity was exactly what we did at the Crowdspring design contest as well by searching for designers that we thought could make a good contribution.
  4. Diversity boosts creativity. In general diversity helps to boost creativity. In that respect internet tools help to lower the barrier significantly to attract a broad public. This holds both for idea management software but also for the Crowdspring website.
  5. Self-regulation within the community. The self-regulation we saw at the logo design process, also happens in another form at idea challenges. People place corrective comments on ‘bad’ ideas and the community also acts as a first filter on which ideas are good and which are not. This is done by letting people vote ideas up or down and the commenting.

In the end it means that you definitely need to make time available to coordinate the whole process. It takes a lot of time to support the community in the right way, but you will probably be positively surprised by the good results you will get with open innovation.

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Roles in managing internal communities

December 21, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

As our Community management practice is growing rapidly, we’ve spend some time at the end of the year to further professionalize our approach. One of the things we did was to describe the different roles and activities we see in managing internal communities. In moderating and activating communities we distinguish between 10 types of roles:

  1. Strategy and tactics: There needs to be a clear vision for the development of the community. This vision needs to be translated to types of activities the members should be encouraged to engage with. You need to develop multiple scenarios because some activities catch on and others do not. If activities do not catch on one should be able to quickly shift into another scenario. It is important to take into account the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question from the participants perspective and to check if there are no barriers that get in the way of these activities.
  2. Change management: To many organizations, achieving a state where people openly share, connect with each other, collaborate, and innovate requires a significant change in culture. Even though we believe that culture does not dictate our behavior, but it is the aggregation of our behaviour that defines culture; you need to actively promote the right behavior and deal with barriers such as fear, hierarchy, and knowledge as power. Senior management plays an important role by setting examples and endorsing exemplar behavior.
  3. Reactive moderation: There are numerous standard tasks that need to be performed. Examples are: making sure people have a complete profile, contacting inactive members, managing login issues, dealing with unwanted behavior, etc.
  4. Proactive moderation: This role is what we often refer to as ‘the magic’. You need to constantly scan the community for activity that, often with some orchestration, can help you realize your strategic vision. This role requires to ‘see through’ a standard question or idea and envisage its potential. Then try and identify and connect participants that can contribute. If the activity has significant potential, we often co-opt a senior manager to publicly endorse the initiative.
  5. Relationships and stakeholder management: This role lies within the client organization. There needs to be a very well networked person to make the connections with relevant people within the organization or with senior management to find people to further activate initiatives selected through the proactive moderation.
  6. Role models: You need commitment from senior management to behave as a role model. They should endorse behavior that is in line with the vision of the community, activate people to take ideas they post a step further, and ask the community questions or challenge them from time to time.
  7. Content management: Communities are enriched by content. Interviews need to be sourced with members, senior management, industry experts or other interesting and engaging people. Content needs to be well planned and prepared in advance so it can be deployed at appropriate times, such as during lulls in platform activity.
  8. Technical management: A plan needs to be in place to role out functionality related to the maturity of the community. Technical management works closely with the other community management roles to create a road-map of functionality. A close coordination with the scenarios is needed to match the functionality to the scenarios being played.
  9. Project management: Moderating and activating a community typically requires performing a great number of tasks. These tasks are either dynamic or routine. Dynamic tasks are responses to what is happening in the community and routine tasks cover things such as contacting all people that have not completed their profile. Rigorous project management is a must to make sure all tasks are covered and completed. We have developed software tailored to managing communities and these tasks in particular.
  10. Champions management: Your community will have members that are more active and set the right example. It is important to build relationships with such users over time and involve them in activating the community. The most important role these champions have, is being an antenna for ideas, problems, or solutions that are worth sharing. They then convince people to take their ideas, problems, or solutions to the community.

If you are interested in how this ties into our methodology and vision, you may also want to check out these earlier posts:

  1. Successful implementation of communities part 1
  2. Successful implementation of communities part 2
  3. Successful implementation of communities part 3
  4. Community management in innovative projects
  5. Start hiring guy #3
  6. Stop pitching social media to management
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World Innovation Convention 2010

December 17, 2009 by Amos Kater | No Comments

We are proud to announce our sponsorship of the World Innovation Convention 2010 which will be held on May 26-28 in Ibiza. You get a 20% reduction when you use this discount code: WICIBIZA41244.