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Sugerencias – or what (not) to do with your suggestion box

November 4, 2009 by Ebbe Nieuweboer | No Comments

Recently my colleague Phil Kropp and I had to go to Madrid for delivering an Idea Champion Training to a group of Idea Challenge Experts at a multinational company. You will be hearing more about this project soon, but that’s not what this blog post is about.

I loved the fact that summer in Madrid apparently lasts till November. Clear sunny skies and 20ºC! But that’s besides the point as well.

What I would like to share with you is something that struck us while getting ready for the flight back from Barajas to Amsterdam. We decided to have a quick snack and we found a small airport restaurant (if you could call it a restaurant). Nothing fancy, but the nice thing was: they did have an old fashioned suggestion box! Or “sugerencias”, as this is the Spanish word for suggestions.

“That’s interesting!”

Naturally, this sparked our professional interest: Does such a small, no frills airport restaurant need a suggestion box? Apparently they think they do, and I think it’s a good thing they have it. I don’t imagine they get many ideas in (or maybe they do), but just having it there indicates that they at least give their customers the opportunity to voice their ideas.

However, when i got up to take a picture (using my iPhone, so it’s not really sharp), I noticed that the suggestion box was positioned next to the rubbish bin! This triggered a sense of: “I wonder what happens to my suggestions after I put them in the box…”

A simple tip…

…if you’re (still) using an old fashioned suggestion box: Don’t put your suggestion box next to the rubbish bin!

Young Innovatives session on Business Model Innovation

November 3, 2009 by Jurjan Huisman | No Comments

young_innovatives After a half year of interesting coffee meet-ups where a lot of networking took place, the Young Innovatives took their initiative to the next level. On Wednesday 14 October the first session focused on a specific topic was organised. This time the theme of the session was Business Model Innovation and the session was organised at the Innovation Factory office in Amsterdam.

Patrick van der Pijl, founder of Business Models Inc., gave a very interesting insight on new ways to look at business models and ways to revise existing business models. This was exemplified by presenting the Business Model Canvas and specifically the development process of their book “Business Model Generation”.

CanvasBM

Tim de Roode, founder of Duraserve, told us about his experiences of setting up a virtual organisation by utilising IT to let vital company activities be performed in other parts of the world. He told about the resemblance with outsourcing, but also that a virtual organisation is one step further than ‘mere’ outsourcing.

Both speakers went into an in-depth discussion with the participants on all the input and questions they raised before the session. Because of this interactive approach and based upon the reactions of the participants, we can state that this first Young Innovatives session focussed on a specific topic was very successful and asks for continuation. This is exactly what we plan to do. So next to the monthly coffee meet-ups, every three months a session based upon an innovation theme will be organised. Keep an eye on the LinkedIn group for updates on these sessions.

Tagged Business Model Innovation, Young Innovatives

Internal or External Idea Management

November 2, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | No Comments

groene eenden Our intern Jan Martijn Everts mentioned a piece of interesting research to me that I would like to share with you.

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.

Tagged idea, idea management, innovatio, Innovation, open, Open Innovation

RibCap, a nice SIT methodology example

October 23, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | No Comments

RibCap I just ran into a nice example of the SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) ’unification’ technique. SIT is a structured method to generate new products or services from existing ones and uses 5 techniques to come up with new propositions. The unification technique lets you bring together 2 products to become one.

The example I ran in to was a company called Ribcap. They have combined hats that keep you warm and helmets to keep you safe. So now you can wear a helmet and still look cool on the ski slopes or the speed skating ring.

Successful implementation of communities 1

October 20, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 3 Comments

Communities, by definition, need to be valuable to all its participants. Enterprises in many cases only deal with the ‘What’s in it for me’ question from their own perspective. They often fail to truly address this question from the participants perspective.

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.

Tagged Collaborate, Community, Community management, Culture, Innovation, soc, socia, Social, Social Media, social network, social networking

Social media count

October 19, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 1 Comment

View the social media interactions as they happen!

If your interested in the assumptions this counter is based on, visit Gary Hayes’ (the guy that designed this) blog.

Start hiring and training Guy #3s

October 16, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 1 Comment

I was writing an article on bottom up innovation and I decided to discuss the definition of bottom up innovation in a social media group on LinkedIn. One of the participants came back with a tip to take a look at a blog post of Seth Godin about guy #3. Seth’s blog post gave me an interesting insight I would like to share with you.

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.

Tagged Community, critical mass, Innovation, leader, Social Media

Survey: 54% of companies prohibit social media use

October 9, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | No Comments

A survey with 1400 CIO’s by Robert Half indicates that 54% of interviewed companies completely prohibit social media.

“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.

Tagged Innovation

Bol.com Inspiration Day

October 5, 2009 by Innovation Factory | No Comments

Innovation Factory facilitators moderated the first Bol.com inspiration day. An inspiring presentation by Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard lead the way for 50 innovative minds to imagine the future for Bol.com. With 27 scenarios discussed and hundreds of ideas generated the results were above expectation!

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