Most often ideas need some attention and enrichments from others to grow to a more mature state before a good decision can be made whether an idea should be picked up to start a project. Hence the seed-metaphor; a seed also needs some attention and enrichment (water) to grow. The nice thing about the upcoming social software tools (Enterprise2.0 software) is that they suit this approach very well. First of all with tools like idea management software it is very easy for employees, and possibly suppliers and clients as well, to contribute ideas. But the real difference stems from the fact that you can use the collective brainpower to enrich (or grow) these ideas. A third interesting aspect of these type of tools is the fact that ideas (and their enrichments) get stored online. So far my story about software tools, because as the name implies they are merely the tools to become more innovative; It’s all about the way you use these tools whether your company will be successful at innovating.

To come back to the failure aspect, another quote in this context is very apt. It is a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, directed to his employees: “I hope you fail often and I hope you fail fast”. As I described before, Google is a very innovative company. What Schmidt implies with his statement is that he wants Google employees to try out a lot of new ideas. In his quote the company culture is pronounced that it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes or formulate an idea that won’t make it. It is part of the process to come to new successful products or services as long as you learn from the mistakes and failures. The more you fail, the more you learn; while the faster you fail, less costs are made to learn. This learning from failures and uncovering rapidly whether an idea is worth an investment in time and money to develop further is very well supported by social tools like idea management software. Like stated before, all the failures (ideas that won’t make it now) are stored online. So others that come up with the same idea at a later stage won’t have to spend time and money to do research for that idea. While over time, the market might have changed or new technologies might have come available and an idea that was rejected before might be great to develop now.

Probably the most crucial aspect in the above described situation is creating a company culture where failure is not punished but stimulated. A CEO stating that exact message is a very important drive for a company to become more innovative.

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The text on their homepage: “Do you have a dream expedition on a bike that you would like to have others to join you on, help you get it off the ground and share the costs? Do you have a dream tour that you wish someone would help you implement it? DreamTours will revolutionize the way cycling tours around the world are created. You create your DreamTour and the community around the world makes it a reality.”

Crowdsourcing is hot, however getting it to work for you is not easy. I believe this initiative is aligned well to be successful. I’ll discuss a number of prerequisites for successful crowdsourcing and community management.

The community is passionate

These guys organise life experience cycle tours. They started with Cairo to Cape Town tour. A trip of 12.000 km in 120 days. They now have 5 of such epic journeys in their program. The people participating in such events have to be passionate. If you ask people with passion to come up with their dream, you’re bound to get interesting input. Currently there are 25 proposed tours.

The community is focussed but there is enough room for creativity

A very difficult aspect to deal with when you engage the crowd is to give them enough focus without destroying creativity. A mistake many companies make when asking the crowd for input is that they formulate the question/challenge broadly to get as many diverse ideas as possible. Such lack of focus is often detrimental for the quality of ideas. You get too many irrelevant ideas. The low quality will scare people away as they are not willing to invest energy into something of such poor quality. Furthermore, in such cases you also see the organisation itself lose interest and the initiative dies. So you need to apply focus. The level of focus correlates with the passion the community has for the subject. The more passion, the more you can apply focus. I believe Dream Tours has found the right balance. The only thing people are asked to do is plot a trip or in other words their dream. The planning and organisation is done by Dream Tours if the route gets enough buy in from the community.

What’s in it for me?

One of the key aspects in having a lively community is answering the “What’s in it for me?” question for the people you would like to contribute. If it isn’t clear how people can benefit from contributing, they will not. The benefit can be as straight forward as prize money or more intangible like feeling good about yourself. “What’s in it for me?” also correlates with the passion of the community; talking about something you love is very satisfying to most people. Not sufficiently addressing this subject is the number one reason for failing communities.

In this case, the answer to the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question is very clear. You get to plan and share your dream journey. If your journey is selected and enough people sign in, you have the option to ride for free or share this prize with the others as a group discount.

How can the Dream Tours community improve?

A powerful way to improve the quality of ideas generated by the community or spin of new ideas is what we call ‘enrichment’. Others enrich ideas that were posted previously. In our practice we usually witness that the true brakethrough comes from insights other people add to the ideas. For Dream Tours, I imagined that people would go crazy enriching the tours proposed by others. Enrichments such as special sites to visit, special mountains to climb, etc. There is no real enrichment activity on Dream Tours. I would suggest Dream Tours to start inviting their members to enrich each others tours. And why stop there? Why don’t they also put their own tours in the community for others to be enriched?

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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:

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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Poetz and Schreir (2009) present “the first real world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm’s professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest.” Their findings are interesting:
1- Ideas created by professionals score significantly lower in terms of novelty than ideas created by users.
2- Professional ideas are attributed lower customer benefit compared to other ideas.
3- Ideas created by professionals tend to be easier to realize.

Kristensson, Gustafsson and Archer (2004, p. 11) provide the first laboratory-based insights that “professional developers elaborated with informational elements that were not as cognitively remote,“ whereas users seemed to have “access to informational elements that were further apart“. Users are thus able to come up with more novel solutions.

In short: If you want to come up with new and customer beneficial ideas it is good practice to involve diverse people with considerable distance to the company processes.

Get the paper.

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From our experience one of the most important success criteria of implementing social media is having clear vision and intention. Social media very often lead to changes in the way people work (together). The intention therefore needs to be changing patterns and empowering people, not successfully implementing software.

Best buy is using social patforms in 5 different ways:

1. Blueshirtnation: Their “Myspace” like network that allows workers to connect to each other. They have many stores throughout the country and they find that it improves job satisfaction if employees feel they are part of something larger than just their store.
2. Watercooler: This online discussion forum is used widely by teams or in stores to spread information quickly and discuss it.
3. wiki’s empower people to all contribute.
4. Loop marketplace: is a space employees can post ideas. Other employees discuss and enrich them.
5. Prediction markets: By trading stocks employees predict future business outcomes. Examples of the outcomes can be sales figures or the completion of projects. This system harnesses the collective knowledge of all employees to help make the best decisions.

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Why Idea Management systems underperform
Although idea management systems are seen as a crucial driver for large organisations to become more innovative, they have to be seen as a tool supporting ‘a more widespread organisational change. These systems need to support a process and an organisation, not the other way around. There are scores of cases of companies that buy and deploy a system without the required consideration given to what needs to be in place for such a system to deliver its full value.

In our practice we most often see idea management systems being deployed with a lack of focus. The organisation has not scoped the problem(s) they want to be solved and identified the people that should  participate in solving them. If you open up the system to a large group of people without a clear question many employees will enter the ideas they have been walking around with and couldn’t sell. This creates a tsunami of poor ideas overwhelming management that cannot evaluate properly because they do not have the capacity to do so. Because the quality of the ideas is low management will not increase resources to evaluate the ideas. This results in neither being able to evaluate ideas properly, give feedback to employees, nor find the good ideas. The lack of feedback leads to disgruntled employees who feel the organisation is not taking them and their ideas seriously. The lack of good ideas lead to disgruntled senior management that feels they are wasting budget. On average such implementations do not last very long.

This wouldn’t be such an issue if you could stop, rethink and try again. However, you have just lost your employees trust. The organisation will need years to forget that, in their eyes, their ideas have gone to waste.

Gary Hamel wrote the following analogy to playing Golf in an article called Innovation Hacker:

“Imagine that you coaxed a keen, but woefully inexperienced golfer onto the first tee at Pebble Beach. After arming the tyro with the latest titanium driver, you challenge him to split the fairway with a monster drive. You promise the neophyte a $100 bonus every time he hits a long bomb that stays out of the rough, and another $100 for every hole where he manages to break par. But what you don’t do is this: You don’t give him any instruction—no books, no tips from Golf Digest, no Dave Pelz and Butch Harmon, no video feedback, and no time off to perfect his swing on the practice range. Given this scenario, how many 200-yard drives is our beginner likely to land in the fairway? How long is he likely to stay avidly devoted to the task at hand? And what kind of return are you likely to get on the $2,000 you spent on a bag full of high tech clubs and the 450 bucks you shelled out for a tee time? The answers are: Not many, not long, and not much. And no one who knows anything about golf would ever set up such a half-assed contest.”

So how do you set up idea management?

1- Focus

What are you trying to achieve?

There are many valid reasons to drive ideas from a crowd. You may be particularly interested in the positive PR it generates, you can have an actual problem that needs solving, or you may want to transform your organisation to become truly innovative. You may also believe, like me, that nobody is as smart as everybody.  Each very valid perspectives, but each requiring fundamentally different approaches. Choose!

What problem needs to be solved?

Well scoped and phrased projects deliver significantly better results. Ask the right question, and you’ll get significantly better answers. Spend a significant amount of time getting this right.

Who are you going to ask for ideas?

Different target groups require a different approach and will generate different ideas. For example, if you are targeting experts you can set a slightly wider scope, can ask a more difficult question, can supply greater amounts of background information, and can rely on peer acknowledgment far more then when you are addressing your entire employee base. Furthermore, you can expect well thought out and described ideas. Such a project will be set-up significantly different than a project aimed at all your staff.

Who is asking?

When a project is genuinely solving someone’s problem people are more inclined to help. Both the problem and the person having the problem should be genuine. Needless to say (genuine) support from executives will help. The word ‘genuine’ is overused on purpose. Your asking an investment from people in your problem, take it seriously!

Who do you need on your team?

Given the answers to the above questions, you will need a team to manage the project. You will need a mix of the following skills: communication skills, skills to make the project (seem) lively and vibrant, skills to coach and motivate participants, and skills to select ideas.

What are the criteria you will use for selection?

There are a number of parameters influencing the use of selection criteria. The idea you are looking for will be somewhere on the scale between close to current business and “radical innovation”. Selection criteria for radical innovations will neither be numerous nor precise, while criteria closer to existing business will be. Another parameter influencing criteria is the target group. The more “expert” your audience, the more criteria you can lay on them. We always advise to communicate your criteria and ask people to explicitly deal with the criteria to improve the quality of the selection process.

How will you reward people?

This is a difficult and much debated issue. Rewards differ from plain peer group appreciation to winning large prizes. Rewards need to be addressed in an ideation project and they need to be appropriate to you organisations culture and ethos.

2- Preparation

Finalise the phrasing of the question. Revisit the question of what problem you are trying to solve, having in mind the above subjects. Is it still sufficiently scoped and precise?

Draft a communication plan. Depending on the above choices you will need to communicate with your target group before, during, and after the project. Draft 3 scenarios. Plan for a low response, an expected response, and for a high response.

In the focus phase you have described your team. You will probably need commitment from people to help you. You may need experts that can help you evaluate or enrich ideas, you may need executives to sponsor your initiative, or the communication department for PR. Get their commitment and train them for the project.

Set up your idea management system. If you are involving a large group of people, you will need a system to automate the workflow and store the ideas.

3- Running the project

When all is set, send out the invitations to the participants or communicate the start of the project in another manner. Methods vary from an email,  press releases, to large kick-off events.

Monitor the quality of the ideas. More important than the number of ideas is the quality. There are two types of quality. The first type is the level in which the ideas solve your problem. The second is whether ideas are phrased well enough to be evaluated. If the first type of quality is not sufficient, your scoping needs attention. If the second type of quality is lacking, you will need to start returning ideas and coach people on expressing themselves.

In your plan you have set goals for the number of ideas coming in and planned action when these goals are not met. During the project you need to monitor the number of ideas coming in and take appropriate action when needed.

Monitor the user discussion about ideas. These discussions can lead to interesting insights you can use in your communication. You also need to monitor for negative sentiment and react to them when they occur.

Depending on the nature and size of the project, organising off line events can help keep the project vibrant and keep the buzz alive.

4- Evaluation and Selection phase

Communicate the closing of the project and communicate the number of ideas received. Select the ideas based on the defined criteria. You can chose to use a system for the selection process or plan a selection workshop. When the ideas are not too numerous a selection workshop is most suitable. A system works well to handle large workloads and helps to log the decision process.

We recommend to plan the follow up on the selected ideas and include that in the communication about the selected ideas. The feeling of having contributed is an important driver for participants to contribute in future projects.

Conclusion
Implementing effective Idea Management is about asking the right people the right questions. Then training and coaching them to become effective at answering them. There are also great software tools to support Idea Management. However, focussing on the tools alone is detrimental to the overall success of idea management.

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“Innovation follows a power law: for every 1,000 oddball ideas, only 100 will be worth experimenting with; out of those, no more than 10 will merit a significant investment, and only two or three will ultimately produce a bonanza. Venture capitalists understand this arithmetic. In a given year, a typical VC firm will review thousands of business plans, meet with hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs, invest in a dozen or so companies, and then hope that one or two of them will become the next Google, Cisco, or Amgen. Few managers, though, seem eager to acknowledge the inescapable arithmetic of innovation.”

Innovation Funnel
This actually means that venture capitalists understand how to utilise the innovation funnel. In a structured innovation process, a lot of ideas need to go into the innovation funnel and along the different stages of the funnel the quantity of ideas goes down and the quality of the ideas goes up. In this way, the innovation funnel provides organisations with a staged process for innovation. To use the same amount of ideas that Hamel mentioned: out of the 1000 ideas that are brought in, the 100 best ideas are selected and get a little time and funding to be developed a little further; at the next stage, these 100 ideas are rated at stricter criteria so that the best 10 ideas will go into the following stage. At the end the one or two best ideas will be developed into actual products or services and all the other ideas and knowledge gathered along the process are stored. In any case it is important not to bet on one horse from the start. Diversification of the ideas is needed. As Hamel puts it:

“Executives, like VC’s, must invest in a portfolio of strategic options, and must resist the temptation to prematurely focus their resources on one or two ’surefire’ ideas. It’s a numbers game. While the median return on a VC’s portfolio may be close to zero (many, if not most, ventures will ultimately fail), the average return can be eye-popping — thanks to the disproportionate effect of one or two runaway successes. The lesson is clear: to build an adaptable company, managers need to worry less about weeding out low-probability ideas, and more about building a diverse portfolio of nonincremental strategic options.”

Innovation Chimney
Our experience shows us that a lot of companies do not follow the stage gates in the intended way. A lot of companies do still collect a large number of ideas. But after the idea collection phase, higher management selects a couple of ideas that get full funding. What you see in such a process is that people responsible for a project/idea more or less connect their career to the project. As a result ideas do not get killed, because that has a very negative connotation. A lot of projects end up floating around. My colleague Jaap Linssen recently wrote an interesting blogpost about the terminology used in the decision to stop a project/idea. For an effective idea management process it is critical that the attitude in organisations towards stopping projects/ideas changes. Although the project might get stopped, still a lot of lessons are learned along the process that can help other projects.

Idea management VC style
To optimise the idea management process in an organisation, it should be implemented in the ‘VC way’. Let ideas actually evolve through the innovation funnel and as part of that process organisations should change their attitude on stopping projects.

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