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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1. The Internet became big after HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he needed another way to present his research.
2. The Camelbak was invented by a paramedic that found it too dangerous to reach for his drinking bottle while on his racing bike. He came up with the idea to sow an I.V. Bag into the back of his shirt.This evolved into a Camelbak.
3. The sports bra was invented in 1970 by a Victoria Woodrow who just started jogging and was severely annoyed by here bouncing breasts.
4. White-out liquid (Tipp-ex) was invented in the 1940’s by a secretary called Bette Nesmith Graham to fix her typing mistakes. She initially named the product “Mistake Out”

Of course there are other categories of innovation without the inventors having a problem. The most interesting being dreams and accidents. We would not have airplanes if nobody had dreamt of flying. If Sir Alexander Fleming had not accidentally left out one of the glass culture dishes in his lab, we would not have penicillin.

If you know of any interesting innovations from people solving their personal problem, feel free to add them in the comments section.

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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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If it isn’t clear to an employee how he or she will benefit from collaborating with others on an internal community, most will simply not engage. Add to that the fear of asking a ’stupid question’, not giving the ‘right answer’, or being ignored when asking a question and internal communities often quickly grind to a halt.

We use a simple slogan when we help enterprises set up communities: ‘People Doing Things Together.’ When setting up a community, you need to go into a great level of detail defining this and make sure they valuable. The definitions can be generalizations or actual examples. The more focused, the easier it will be to show potential users ‘what’s in it for them’ and get them engaged.

Some examples:

• Product managers ask for available market research for a new concept they have.
• Marketeers test a new proposition amongst peers.
• R&D tests the market potential of a new application with marketing and sales colleagues all over the world.
• Controllers share and discuss their annual budgeting spreadsheets to get best practices for next years budgeting rounds.
• HR searches the community for a person suitable for a certain role based on expertise and experience shown in peoples’ community activities.
• A product manager wants to make a manufacturing investment but his market will not give him sufficient revenue to justify the investment. He asks product managers in other markets for their potential revenue. Their combined markets may justify the investment.
• An insurance product manager in Belgium asks his colleagues in The Netherlands if they have implemented a specific coverage in their insurance, and if they have how it was done and what the result was.
• Before testing his new campaign in an expensive survey, a marketeer tests the campaign, at no costs, in his own organization.

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The post is about a film someone sent him.

Seth writes: “My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement. Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob. We need more guy #3s.”

One of the key strenghts our company has, is that we can get bottom up innovation and internal corporate communities to work. It has always been a bit of a struggle to describe precisely what we do. We have always called what we do ’supplying perceived critical mass.’ Perceived critical mass is needed when a (innovation) community is not large enough to look vibrant and without intervention would look dull and die. Until the community gains enough critical mass to be vibrant itself, a supporting team generates all sorts activity to stir things up. Some people find this description too abstract though. Reading Seth’s blog made me see a big void in innovation management and how we create value for our clients.

When most companies set-up innovation an important aspect of that is looking for entrepreneurs (guy #1). Not much attention is given to make sure that when guy #1 starts dancing there are people standing by to join in. Many companies have hiring policies and training to make people behave more entrepreneurial. I have never seen a company hire or train with the aim for people to be the initial supporters of intrapreneurs. When asked many companies will agree there is a big gap between the entrepreneurs running ahead and the the rest of the organization. You can have all the entrepreneurs, processes and tools you like, if you do not fill the gap, you’ll be completely dependent on the chance of a guy #3 jumping in. We fill this void by giving hands on support to entrepreneurs, activating employees to help out entrepreneurs, or coach entrepreneurs to find guy #3’s.

Wouldn’t it be great if we would structurally fill the gap. There are large groups of employees that would qualify for the role of guy #3. Traditional staff functions are generally very knowledgeable however, in many companies they take on the role of firing squad, telling the intrapreneur why his or her idea will not work. If these employees could be trained as Guy #3s this would be very beneficial. So the value for companies is not in training controllers to think like entrepreneurs. The trick is to train controllers to dance with entrepreneurial people.

In internal communities a similar problem exists. Usually community managers fully focus on finding people that will post content and stop there. If people are actually asking colleagues for input or help, unanswered questions are a detrimental warning: “Don’t ask your question here because you’ll be ignored by your colleagues and look stupid.”Also questions without initial response often remain without response. In the communities we support, we find guy #1s but also find guys #2 and 3 to respond quickly to guy #1. After guy #3, the community will take over.

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“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology.

A few decades ago the same reasoning took place regarding phones. Normal employees were not trusted with a phone on their desk.

When I look around, I see that the companies that are consequently successful are open and interact with their environment. I bet that the average company allowing their employees to access social media is client focused and that the average company not allowing access has operational excellence as a greater priority than their clients.

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Sales of innovative products in the Great Depression
In a blog post, written on the Innovate on Purpose blog, a comparison is made between the recent recession and the Great Depression. The writer quotes a report “Collateral Damage” released by the Boston Consulting Group. The report states that industries with highly innovative products withstood the Great Depression fairly well. An example is given in the form of the sales figures of refrigerators, considered an innovative product at the time, which grew by 30% from 1929 to 1933. You can grant this to the desire to be an early adopter or the fact that over time refrigerators save money by keeping food fresher, or a number of other attributes. But in the end, people were spending money on innovative products and services in truly bad economic times. To relate this with the recent recession, the winning combination would be to strive for innovative products and services that let consumers save money.

Cost saving idea challenges
Innovation is not only about new products and services, but also about new processes. A process innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved production or delivery method. First of all, idea generation focused on process innovation often generates ideas that cut costs. So the combination of innovation and cost efficiency can be brought together by idea challenges focussed on cost savings. In times when budgets are being cut back, this aspect of innovation can be very helpful. Secondly, when striving for a truly innovative environment it is very important that everybody in the organisation participates. This creates a situation where a small contribution by all, means a big difference at the bottom-line.

Involving all employees in a cost saving idea challenge therefore seems to create a double-win: an innovative organisation and ideas for cost savings.

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Innovation and strategic agility
In a previous post on the Innovation Playground blog, the author states that the best investment you can make right now is to invest in the innovation capability of your organisation and reorganise to become an agile corporation. But what actually is strategic agility? On the website www.strategicagility.com the concept is defined as follows:

“The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to create value for a company.”

Strategic agility is already important in normal economic times, but even more so in difficult times. Because the environment changes quickly and organisations have to adjust to them. In times of high economic growth not much drive exists to change the organisation, but in difficult economic times one simply needs to change. Lower budgets make people more creative.

How to become more strategically agile?
According to the authors of the book Fast Strategy, three essential capabilities need to be in place to be strategically agile: strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly) and collective commitment (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions –fast, without being bogged in “win-lose” politics at the top). In the end, a lot of companies have overcapacity because of a shrinking production. Being agile involves resource fluidity: being able to put that overcapacity to use in a different way.

Act now!
This is the right time to use the overcapacity for innovation purposes. If you invest wisely to become more innovative and agile, your organisation will have a competitive advantage when the economy turns around.

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“The ecobee Smart Thermostat is a 7-day programmable thermostat designed to help you conserve energy, save money and reduce your environmental impact. The ecobee Smart Thermostat provides ease and flexibility in the management of your home environment and comfort.”

In itself the Ecobee isn’t a great example of ‘out off the box’ thinking, but is a nice SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) example. Specifically this is an example of the ‘dividing’ exercise where the functions of a product are split to see if they add value in that way. In this case the controls are taken of the thermostat and offered in a different way (the web). Another example of ‘dividing’ would be the remote control of televisions.

SIT is very powerful as it forces you to think in ways you are not used to leading to very creative ideas. The SIT workshops we run with our clients always lead to ideas that are pursued further. Give it a try!

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Just to name a few things: sharing documents, sharing links, wiki’s, sharing photo’s, setting goals for yourself and others, etc, etc. Integration with Google Calender,  Salesforce, Webex, Twitter, Tripit, Google Docs, Google Reader, etc etc. Yes, very impressive.

However, after an hour we stopped using Cubetree because it just generates too many updates. We tested with 3 people and were just completely overwhelmed by the updates. We imagined what would happen if 15 more colleagues would partake and shivered. For now we are going back to using Yammer for our internal communication, and wiki’s and Google Docs for collaboration. If Cubetree solves this issue, we’ll give it another go and potentially implement it at clients.

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